Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity

Abstract

Jerome, Roy, ed. Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 338 pp. $19.95 paperback. This collection brings together articles on postwar West German masculinity, written by a group of accomplished literature professors and psychologists from Germany and the United States. The editor, Roy Jerome, is a clinical psychologist specializing in masculinity, trauma, and violence and the overriding theme here is therapeutic: the collection intends to work through men's silence and shame about the Nazi past, in order to promote healing and shape more tolerant masculine identities in contemporary Germany. These are ambitious goals. The success of the volume, however, will be determined primarily by the reader's sympathy for neo-Freudian depth psychology, as the majority of the contributions draw heavily on psychoanalytic theory and practice. After an introductory essay that provides a brief overview of methodologies and key literary texts for German men's studies (Klaus-Michael Bogdal), the book turns to theoretical considerations on male identity. Here a case study by Dr. Tilman Moser, a psychoanalyst whose practice concentrates on treating psychopathologies related to National Socialism, exemplifies the volume at its most clinical. Moser uses techniques of Korpertherapie (psychomotor therapy), which prescribe physical contact between analyst and analysand, to lead the son of an SS officer through an anguished therapy session. This offers some insight into the way at least one man has come to terms with his Nazi father, but is difficult to generalize as a model for postwar male identity. A following essay on the family dynamics that lead to child abuse (Klaus-Jurgen Bruder) only weakly asserts a connection to more general constructions of German masculinity; as is often the case here, psychology trumps historical context. The second half of the volume examines postwar West German literature and offers a useful overview of themes and literary movements related to masculinity issues. The articles, again dominated by psychoanalytic interpretations, shed some light on the way subsequent generations of writers dealt with manhood and memories of National Socialism. Essays on Hans Erich Nossack (Inge Stephan) and Wolfgang Borchert (Hans-Gerd Winter) describe a range of literary conceptions of a denazified masculinity in the immediate postwar period. Other work in this section brings us into the 1990s, including a general review of homosexual imagery in West German literature after 1945 (Wolfgang Popp), the confluence of the personal and the historical/political in the vaterliteratur of the 1980s (Barbara Kosta), and a strong piece by Russell West on male identity and the father-son relationship in ex-neo Nazi Ingo Hasselbach's Fuhrer-Ex: Memoirs ofa Neo Nazi (1996). …