Innovative Trends in Women's and Gender Studies of the National Socialist Era

Abstract

The text is less a review of the new literature than a reflection on significant and innovative current trends in the historiography on women and gender in the National Socialist era. The first part deals with various women's activities within milieus and professions, including their room for manoeuvre: midwives, social workers, female Nazi functionaries, and female auxiliary workers of the Nazi Wehrmacht. The second part of the article addresses specific features of biopolitics, targeted not only against Jews but also against asocial women, homosexuals and prostitutes. It also looks at visual images of bodies. Although the Nazis tried to create strongly determined binaries to categorize ‘we’ and ‘the others’ in the arts and other propaganda material, there existed, in fact, a broad spectrum of body images, especially among media stars. A third trend in the history of the Third Reich deals not only with the politics of exclusion but also of inclusion, as found in the concept of Volksgemeinschaft (national community), a concept that had many facets, such as the Volksfamilie, comradeship and home front. And it was the media that had the task of ‘translating’ this concept to the people in many appealing ways. The fourth part considers the gendering of memories after 1945 and the dominance of male narratives and points of view. The four parts of the article are intended to contribute to intersectional history and the history of social engineering.