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 Julia K. Gruber Elisabeth Krimmer. German Women’s Life Writing and the Holocaust: Complicity and Gender in the Second World War. Cambridge UP, 2018. 292 pp. Cloth, $74.97. In this insightful literary and historical study about female complicity, Elisabeth Krimmer, a veteran when it comes to writing about World War II and about women, analyzes largely unknown women authors’ memoirs, diaries, docunovels, and autofiction. According to Krimmer, repetitions, formulaic expressions, rigid structures, omissions, denial, inconsistencies, non sequiturs, and contradictions, which she locates in an impressive number of mostly noncanonical texts written by army auxiliaries, nurses, refugees who participated in the German flight west from the Russian army, rape victims, and Holocaust survivors make up “the grammar of complicity” (3). Apart from introducing this novel linguistic concept, Krimmer also provides carefully crafted close readings and shows not only what motivated the authors to become active supporters of the National Socialist regime but also what eventually estranged some of them from it, and how Jewish concentration camp survivors’ life writing, such [End Page 117] as Ruth Klüger’s autobiography Weiter leben: Eine Jugend (1992; Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, 2001), offer “a powerful counterargument to the myth of German innocence” (225). Krimmer convincingly argues that World War II has traditionally been perceived as a male enterprise and that women’s different degrees of participation, as well as their suffering as rape victims and refugees, have been largely overlooked. On the one hand, Krimmer shows that— due to their gender— the behavior of a few, especially cruel female perpetrators, was considered more unnatural and therefore deserving of harsher verdicts than that of their male counterparts. On the other hand, due to the Nazis’ tendency to exclude women from leadership roles, women were more likely to take on the role of the bystander. Krimmer introduces an innovative perspective by pointing out a correlation between the relative lack of studies on bystanders and a corresponding lack of studies that focus on women’s participation and suffering in war and genocide. In the introduction she explores the relationship between gender and warfare, the concept of complicity, the roles of women in the National Socialist regime, and the genre of memoir. She touches on the topic of trauma and points out that instead of focusing on the much discussed “unspeakable experiences” of traumatized victims, we should realize that victims have not had difficulty giving words to their trauma, but rather it has been difficult for their audience to listen (16). The book consists of an introduction and a conclusion with five chapters in between. Every chapter also offers a conclusion, which is very helpful as Krimmer summarizes her main points before she transitions to the next chapter. One of the many noteworthy takeaways from the book is Krimmer’s discussion of representations of the “angels in white,” German army nurses and inmate nurses in concentration camps, in literary fiction. Krimmer’s analysis reveals that while army nurses had to learn to turn a blind eye to their war experiences, nurses who served in concentration camps had to “refocus their gaze and redefine the meaning of care” (19). In the conclusion, Krimmer mentions that while discussing with others her ideas about women’s complicity, she often encountered a reluctance to hold female bystanders accountable. Her study contributes to feminist theory by arguing that, by not recognizing how women actively supported the Nazi regime and by insisting instead on women’s status as victims during the war, the very feminism scholars seek to advocate is undermined (240). By adding her important study to the canon of literary [End Page 118] criticism of life writing by women on World War II and the Holocaust, Krimmer has done a superb job at linking collective memory and social solidarity. Elisabeth Krimmer shares that although her own parents had been too young to participate in World War II, she witnessed a form of “post-guilt” whenever she heard her father vocalize his justification and defense of Germany’s role in the war, while she observed that her mother remained...