German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust: Complicity and Gender in the Second World War by Elisabeth Krimmer

Abstract

Reviewed by: German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust: Complicity and Gender in the Second World War by Elisabeth Krimmer Christine Nugent (bio) German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust: Complicity and Gender in the Second World War Elisabeth Krimmer Cambridge UP, 2018, v + 288 pp. ISBN 978-1108472821, $105.00 hardcover. In the vast and still growing literature on National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, women's war stories have until recently been underrepresented or altogether absent. Women have been virtually invisible in their active participation and implication in war and genocide, but also as sufferers of crimes committed against them, in their roles as rape victims, refugees or expellees, and camp inmates. Elisabeth Krimmer argues that a full understanding of modern war, of suffering and perpetration, but also of the complicity of bystanders, is impossible without the inclusion of women's war experiences. German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust contributes significantly to filling this gap by examining a large body of women's life writing, including diaries, memoirs, "docunovels," and autobiographically inspired novels mostly by non-Jewish German women bystanders. According to Krimmer, Professor of German at UC Davis, these texts reveal complicity with the National Socialist regime, even if their authors also suffered through the war. That complicity manifests itself through ruptured narratives, conceptual and visual blind spots, and silences. Common features are omissions, denial, inconsistencies, internal contradictions, non sequiturs, the inability to form a coherent narrative of the self or integrate disparate facts into the dominant storyline, and a failing sense of reality. Krimmer coins the term "grammar of complicity" as shorthand for these narrative features (3, 239). Just as grammatical conventions allow communication through language, the [End Page 903] grammar of complicity exposes why and how women became complicit with the Nazi regime and kept it alive through various forms of passive support (12). The corpus of analyzed texts is more diverse than comparable studies and includes narratives by German army auxiliaries, military nurses, refugees, and rape victims. Notably, Krimmer also includes three texts by men: Red Army soldier Wladimir Gelfand's diary, a poem by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Lev Kopelev's memoir, which all deal with representations of rape. Their inclusion addresses the dilemma of stories of war-time rape: if the victim's suffering is omitted or downplayed, the stories perpetuate the silence and trauma associated with the crime of rape; if the issue of complicity inherent in the stories is neglected, they erase the historical context in which the rape occurred in the first place and do injustice to the victims of National Socialism (20, 117). The inclusion of writings by Jewish German women also distinguishes this work from others that focus exclusively on members of the perpetrator society or on victims' voices. While Krimmer exposes structures of complicity in the writings of non-Jewish German women, she includes texts by women designated as "Other" and excluded from Hitler's so-called community of the people (Volksgemeinschaft) to allow a view from the outside in. Yet Krimmer is careful to note that she does not argue for a national community of all victims of Nazism that includes both non-persecuted and persecuted Germans (17). The book is organized in five chapters, each beginning with a discussion of the relevant historical context and discursive framework, and followed by interpretation of select works. Iconic texts such as Ilse Schmidt's Die Mitläuferin: Erinnerungen einer Wehrmachtsangehörigen, Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, and Ruth Klüger's weiter leben are included alongside largely unknown narratives such as Hildegard Gartmann's Blitzmädchen, Gabi Köpp's Why Was I a Girl? The Trauma of a Flight 1945, and Erika Morgenstern's Surviving Was More Difficult Than Dying. Each of the first four chapters is devoted to one distinct element of the grammar of complicity: narrative ruptures, conceptual and visual blind spots, silences, and parallel stories, all of which Krimmer suggests may be understood, in the words of Gabriele Schwab, as "defensive reactions against the knowledge of belonging to a nation of perpetrators" (qtd. in Krimmer 18; Schwab 95). The fifth chapter presents a view of non-Jewish German...