from History and Memory Volume 11, Number 1Collective Memory Divided and Reunited: Mothers, Daughters and the Fascist Experience in Germany
Joyce Marie Mushaben
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I know her: when I lay unconscious
last night, she climbed into bed with me
calling my name
she insists we are
sisters under the same skin.
Michèle Roberts
"the fascist, when female"
Collective memory, Andy Markovits and Simon Reich assert, "is the lens through which the past is viewed," one purpose of which is to help "both masses and elites interpret the present and decide on policy." But as these authors also stress, any analysis of German political behavior needs to distinguish between history as a set of objectively definable events and collective memory, the subjective attribution of meaning to those key events. Collective memory becomes the more formidable influence over time, due to "its multiplicity, its murkiness, its malleability."1
The dilemma confronting united Germany is that the mutually exclusive ideological courses pursued by the two separate states between 1949 and 1989 left distinctive imprints on the historical memories of most Eastern and Western citizens. The problem lies not so much with a need to reconcile "the facts" regarding a particularly barbaric phase of German history but rather with the very different "lessons" each side feels compelled to draw from the fascist era as a guide to future policies, domestic and foreign. Although Markovits and Reich note the importance of "geography and time" on the (re)shaping of collective memory, their own focus on "masses and elites" pays scant attention to the refractive impact of gender on both historical experience and recall. Their analysis thus obscures the fact that the national qua socioeconomic identities of women (a demographic majority in the nation united) have been most directly reconfigured by post-unity policies.
While Germany's women have never sought to deny or downplay atrocities committed in the name of das deutsche Volk under Hitler, they have, until recently, failed to confront their own relationship to national history with the same degree of typically German Gründlichkeit with which they have traditionally excoriated patriarchy's role in those developments. One of the ironic consequences of unification, a process many Germans would like to embrace as the peaceful finale to an especially traumatic chapter of national history, is that the persistent reluctance of many feminists (and other New Left elements) to see themselves as full-fledged members of das Volk can no longer be sustained. Paradoxically, the process of rendering the German nation whole again has produced new fault lines between Eastern and Western women as to the "meaning" of their once shared history. It has also given rise to a paradigm shift among West German feminists intent on analyzing current as well as historical manifestations of sexism, racism and nationalism.
My aim here is not to offer a "representative" sampling of women's recollections of German history since 1945 but only to shed light on new efforts to "conquer the past" called forth by generational currents, unification and recent waves of right-extremist violence among German youth. This article begins by examining the divergent systemic lessons gleaned from history by women living on different sides of the Berlin Wall prior to 1989. It then highlights points of convergence and conflict over the specific lessons of history drawn by select female elites in Germany's long-divided parts. Finally, it explores linkages between gender identity and historical consciousness being played out along generational lines. I focus on two groups of women whose views of German identity seem to lie at opposite ends of the national spectrum: established antinational feminists whose political socialization coincided with the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a new breed of ultranational female extremists who have come of political age since 1989.
Pre-unity Barriers to Feminist VergangenheitsbewältigungThe diametrically opposed courses pursued by the two Germanys regarding questions of historical memory--and collective guilt--have indeed left their mark on the national identities of Eastern and Western women. Katherine Verdery holds that nation is most appropriately understood "as a construct, whose meaning is never stable but shifts with the changing balance of social forces."2 Yet for millions of postwar women, the meaning of nation was permanently inscribed on the walls of former Nazi concentration camps, leading many to construe nation and democracy as antithetical concepts after 1949--though they need not be.
Given the overwhelming significance of the Third Reich for German historical consciousness, feminists in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), along with New Leftists, and dissidents in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), have usually failed to distinguish between two competing models of nationalism: ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism. Just as "the recourse to the German nation had become inconceivable for democratic movements" in the Eastern state prior to 1989, commitment to nation and democracy were construed as irreconcilable in the West.3 Democracy nonetheless establishes the parameters within which "the struggle over the meaning of nation" takes place; emphasizing plurality and tolerance of societal differences, civic nationalism deliberately seeks to transcend the (imagined) unity of identities imposed under ethnic nationalism. Millions of Germans, especially those of leftist bent, failed to recognize prior to 1990 that nationalism can also serve as "the force that [withstands] the force of organized forgetting."4 It was clearly necessary for the Germans to make a radical break with the ethnic nationalism of the past in order to promote their own moral renewal and political rehabilitation after 1949. Without a sense of essential national continuity, however, "no mastery of the past [would be] possible because the subject of guilt and remembrance [would have] vanished," with the result that "the complete denial of continuity would amount to exculpation."5
Both countries claimed to be the only legitimate postwar German state: the Federal Republic as the judicially designated successor to the 1871 Bismarckian Reich, and the German Democratic Republic as the systemically "purged" replacement of the Nazi regime. Socialism made-in-the-GDR became the historically indigenous alternative to fascism, a dogma precluding dissidents from drawing parallels between the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships. A tendency among Western politicians to link the two forms of totalitarianism in public discourse only intensified the Eastern citizens' problem of historical isolation qua negative demarcation from "the other Germany." The existence of two separate states precluded feminist scholars, in particular, from engaging in a no-holds-barred confrontation with the national past prior to 1990 (for reasons outlined below). None of a growing cadre of female academics participated directly in the so-called Historians' Controversy (Historikerstreit) of 1986-1987, for example, a debate characterized by Charles Maier as an intellectual confrontation between "fathers-turned-grandfathers and sons-turned-fathers."6
The GDR orchestrated the most complete break with the past, though it overestimated its own success in wiping out the sources (as opposed to the symbols) of racist extremism. East Germany's founding as "a new socialist nation" (the label used after 1968), wedded to crippling reparation payments made to the Soviets, was perceived by its confined residents as a key act of collective absolution and atonement. Physical division, socialization of the means of production and verordneter anti-Faschismus (officially imposed antifascism) served as the GDR's official vehicles for "organized forgetting" vis-à-vis the darker side of German history. Leaders of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) were particularly selective in their approach to reclaiming German history prior to the mid-1970s, along the lines of our Thomas Münzer/your Frederick the Great, our Ernst Thälmann/your Joseph Goebbels.7 Opposition forces, mindful that many SED leaders and communists had personally suffered at the hands of the Nazis, were driven into "critical loyalty"; East German intellectuals ranging from dramatist Bertold Brecht to writers Christa Wolf and Anna Seghers, in particular, were deeply committed to avoiding a repeat of crimes past.8
The FRG, by contrast, left many questions of remorse and expiation to "the moral discretion of individuals,"9 though it admitted to collective responsibility by way of state compensation to select victims and through its support of a "special relationship" to Israel. For many Westerners, the Nuremberg trials became "the great symbolic disposal site for all Nazi garbage" as far as systematic mass atrocities were concerned, while denazification processes posited various degrees of guilt and complicity at the individual level.10 The manner in which denazification was executed induced a defensive rather than an introspective response; many citizens reimagined themselves as the victims of war, especially after the mass expulsions from the Eastern territories (leading a small but vociferous group to view 8 May 1945 as a day of occupation/Besetzung and banishment/Vertreibung, not as one of liberation/Befreiung). President von Weizsäcker eased the West German conscience further by recognizing all victims of fascism (including women, communists and homosexuals) in his commemorative speech of 8 May 1985.11
The collective-guilt question was occasionally played out beyond government chambers, often conditioned by generational impulses. The New Left protests of the late 1960s, for example, raised direct questions of parental responsibility at the same time more radical New Left elements rejected personal implication by siding with oppressed Palestinians against the Israeli state (as evidenced by the shoulder-draped scarves, in the style of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which became a regular feature of their protest attire). A second unofficial processing of the past assumed the form of the highly intellectualized Historians' Controversy in 1986, an attempt on the part of conservative scholars to place Nazi atrocities in a "global historical context" stretching from the massacres of Genghis Khan to mass starvation and murder under Stalin. However, beyond the 1950s, most such debates, official and unofficial, over "what it meant to be German" left average citizens untouched.
Several other factors precluded an unrestricted confrontation with some of the issues now being raised by feminist scholars, likewise connected to the existence of two separate states prior to 1990. Children of the Founding Generation were taught throughout the 1950s not to ask too many questions at home, though women, curiously, remained less inclined to deflect feelings of guilt. According to a 1950/51 survey, 60 percent of the women but only 44 percent of the men admitted to feelings of personal or collective responsibility.12 Out of this era, two groups emerged: comprising the first were those who embraced the parental forces of memory-suppressed (though a few sons attacked their fathers through literature, while daughters went into therapy, Claudia Koppert claims). Then there were those who rebelled thoroughly against the parental denial of responsibility, though even this group reserved its most vehement attacks for "the system."
The links between the Western women's movement and the New Left of the late 1960s promoted a focus on global liberation, that is, from authoritarianism and patriarchy presenting themselves in the guise of monopoly capitalism. In retrospect, one can argue that
the '68 Generation, and that applies to feminists, wanted to push through a radical world change, for which their own process of growing up in the reactionary '40s, '50s and '60s had not prepared them internally. The fixation of the "elders" with organs of authority, with Führer and State was related through and through to the stance of the '68ers to ideologies and Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Che; now as then one did battle against the "deviants," one was always fighting over the right line; the path to a more free and humane society was plastered with crass intolerance and self-righteousness.13Second-Wave feminism's roots in the New Left movement also rendered it vulnerable to a compulsion to attack any and all semblances of nationalism as automatically equivalent to resurgent fascism. In addition to undercutting their positive identification with a democratized Federal Republic, in lieu of the old authoritarian state, this linkage produced a new historical paradox, "that simply out of the permanent pressure to learn from history ... one slipped past the entire phenomenon of Stalinism with vague language, because one was always afraid that s/he had to guard the Bundesrepublik against neofascism, that this so to speak was the main task...."14
The orthodox-Stalinist Left in the GDR, meanwhile, targeted monopoly capitalism as the root cause of fascism but ignored its own patriarchal tendencies by insisting that socialism had achieved the full emancipation of women. There was no extensive communication between the women of East and West (which FRG feminists clearly would have had a better chance to initiate) that might have fostered an understanding of linkages between the forces of industrial production, be they capitalist or socialist, the power of patriarchy, and the sociocultural roots of fascism.
Secondly, special ties to the new social movements (NSM) of the 1970s enabled FRG feminists to "think globally, act locally," blessed as they were with the time, money and rights to travel and protest. GDR women were increasingly occupied with the deterioration of the socialist economy; what time and energy remained was used to cultivate their own eco-peace movements at the expense of building an autonomous feminist movement (with a few exceptions, such as Women for Peace). Hence, feminism's New Left and NSM linkages provided both groups with important vehicles for obscuring and/or avoiding the troublesome National Question altogether prior to 1989.
Last but not least, the feminist rule, "the personal is the political," sets a very difficult standard for any scholar seeking to explore her relationship to German qua national identity, plagued as she may be by "a laming guilt-consciousness"; guilt implies, "at least theoretically, that one's self or the others could have behaved differently."15 The larger political context prior to 1989 shielded German women against this standard; as a result, they cultivated their own denial strategies, grounded in the same dichotomous thinking--nationalism as an all-or-nothing proposition--for which they have often castigated the patriarchal powers that be.
Situating Women in the Discourse Over the Nazi PastEarly explorations of female roles under the Third Reich rested on a presumption among many scholars that to the extent women had been involved in the promotion of Nazi ideology, they had done so not out of self-interest but in an adaptive response to masculine notions of racism and anti-Semitism. While the second generation's desire for self-exoneration may be understandable in personal qua psychological terms, a primary emphasis on women's victim status simultaneously obscured deeper questions of female motivation, perhaps in reaction to the claim that women had played a significant role in bringing Hitler to power.16
German history does show "that women were never particularly immune to nor did they actively struggle against racism and anti-Semitism, either in times of colonialism or National-Socialism."17 Many profited from Third Reich social policies as well as from the expropriation of Jewish homes and businesses. For women deemed "worthy," Nazi intervention in family life afforded a wedge against the power of husbands and provided many individual career opportunities, including leadership positions. Acquiescence to the collective Größenwahn (megalomania) also put Aryan women in the possession of "multiple identities" as Christians, Germans, industrial workers, and mothers for the Fatherland.18 This aided them in coping with cross-cutting status losses at the time and, one could argue, later shielded them against postwar feelings of guilt through their ability to re-identify with various victimized groups.
Frigga Haug's Opfer-Täter (victim-perpetrator) thesis, arguing that women necessarily consent to structures of oppression, earned her the title of Nestbeschmützerin (one who "dirties the nest") in some feminist quarters but opened the door to a qualitatively new debate over the Nazi era in others.19 Haug's analysis began to chip away at the traditional victim-perpetrator dichotomy, albeit without challenging the fundamental premise of male agency. Given their persistent tendency to define anti-Semitism as a male sickness, rooted in a classical oedipal complex,20 most scholars neither questioned the significance of the mother-daughter relationship in generating support for the fascist regime, nor did they offer sufficient explanation for cases of active female engagement.
Christine Thürmer-Rohr's conceptualization of weibliche Mittäterschaft (female co-perpetrators) added another dimension to the discussion in 1983. Thürmer-Rohr set out to contemporize female "complicity" by raising the prospect of a global concentration camp under the reign of nuclear weapons, curiously drawing upon the Hiroshima experience while ignoring women's response to real death-factories under the Nazis.21 The essence of women's culpability lay not in self-propelled deeds but in capitulating to men's designs, a form of active self-victimization. Though men still bore the primary burden of guilt, women were recognized as having their own interests in the rewards of compliance.
The assertion that women's coresponsibility stems largely from having said yes to men all too facilely suggests that the next generation need only turn its back on the evil deeds of men, or abandon men altogether, in order to redress the guilt of mothers, aunts and grandmothers. One thus needs to distinguish not only between degrees of self-subordination to Nazi dictates but also among various modes of engagement, for example, as primary organizers, collaborators, secondary accomplices, alleged "know-nothings" and resistance fighters. In short, German "herstorians" might have made earlier use of categories already identified by the Occupational Powers for purposes of denazification.
Karin Windaus-Walser, a Swiss scholar residing in West Germany, was the next to rattle the foundations of feminist analysis through her 1987 repudiation of "the blessing of female birth."22 Portraying women as eternally subordinate to male leadership reinforced the social constructions of gender and ignored their specific motivations. Scholars could no longer ignore the premiums women accrued for "good behavior," which had opened up "spaces" for the pursuit of their own interests. Windaus-Walser addressed the potential driving force of a "female logic" separate from the ideological incentives and power motives of men. The "murderous normality" witnessed under fascism was due not solely to the self-propelled evil of men and the reactive accommodation of women, she insisted; rather, the self-conceived interests of men and the self-conceived interests of women mutually influenced each other. There had never been a historical situation in which men were able to act completely free of women's influence. Defining patriarchy as the domination of women by men led feminists to address only the power of the father, and thus to ignore the potential power of the mother. The lack of a thorough confrontation between mothers and daughters during the late 1960s, in her judgment, amounted to an Ent-Schuldigung (ex-culpation and excusing) of the Perpetrator Generation.
Windaus-Walser pinpointed a number of fundamental weaknesses inherent in the feminist historical approaches of the 1980s. One was an ostensible tendency to affirm the apolitical nature of women by focusing on their personal qualities of strength and endurance, e.g. the Trümmerfrauen (rubble-women) of the reconstruction era, who may have been trying to "sweep away" proof of their own anti-Semitism. Gerda Szepanzky, for instance, had depicted her sample of hero-mothers and war-widows as conquering multiple adversities, suggesting that their struggle for survival after 1945 overrode the importance of their actions during the war itself.23 In presuming a female capacity for nurturing, feminists neglected the role nurses and medical assistants had played in the forced sterilization and racial hygiene campaigns. Gisela Bock offered an account of 400,000 persons involuntarily sterilized over eleven years; by stressing that 95 percent of target groups were "Aryan" and 90 percent who died were female, she ostensibly reduced Nazi race politics to gender politics.24 Women who had, in fact, supported racialized natalism were consequently overlooked as collaborators.25
Researchers moreover seemed motivated by a need to profile all women as the victims of fascism through attacks on the Nazi Frauenbild (women's image) qua Frauenpolitik (women's policies); the two were not equivalent, since certain projects pursued by female Nazi leaders, such as equal pay, had a progressive component. Individual women accrued atypical political influence by promoting an ostensibly antifeminist Frauenbild. Angelika Ebbinghaus had already testified to high levels of identification with the Nazi cause among women in powerful positions, though, ultimately, even the punishment meted out to prominent Nazi women connoted their secondary status.26 Gertrude Scholz-Klink, the one woman to attain national ministerial status, was the only member of the Hitler government not sentenced to death at Nuremberg; she was released after two years in prison (and now lives from donations made by post-1990 neo-Nazi groups).27 Windaus-Walser stressed the perils of presupposing a "shared identity" grounded in repression among Aryan and Jewish women, noting with regard to Bock: "the 1 percent who were victims among women become a potential 100 percent--the millions of actual dead in the concentration camps recede into the background."28 Women embraced Aryan images of men producing death, women producing life, yet millions had sent their sons and husbands into war (with varying degrees of enthusiasm), implying they had had their own "logic" for doing so.
Yet another dimension critically absent from German feminist research throughout the 1980s was a treatment of national character per se: what was "typically German" about women's stake in and their support of, or their opposition to, the Nazi regime? Pre-1990 writings exuded a deafening silence over the nature of female anti-Semitism; Bock's 600-page text on sterilization ignored the issue altogether. If mentioned at all, anti-Semitism was depicted as "an incarnation of masculine megalomania," nourished by polarized gender roles.29 Yet men of other nations had even volunteered to combat German anti-Semitism in its most barbaric form, with a vigor not witnessed in their fight against Fascist Italy and despite anti-Jewish strains in their home countries. A few women questioned whether feminist theorists might have followed a subconscious desire to blame Jews for patriarchy, as opposed to some mythical matriarchal Germanentum.30 Pre-1945 women's organizations proved quite willing to put up a fight when it came to defending their own turf, that is, in demanding "equal rights" (albeit unsuccessfully) for specific female groups in the labor force. They were not willing to struggle in areas where fundamental rights of non-Aryan women were at stake, as evidenced by their outright rejection of Jewish women's organizations after 1933.31
In the GDR, women's efforts to process the Nazi past were more likely to surface under the cloak of "literature," the most prominent of which included works about the war experience by international prizewinners Christa Wolf and Anna Seghers.32 Fascism became a life-long theme for Seghers, whose most recognized texts, Das siebte Kreuz and Transit, were written during her forced exile in Mexico (1940- 1947). Literary treatments did more than hint at questions of personal responsibility: in Kindheitsmuster, for example, "the Communist" asks Wolf's central (autobiographical) character--the young, unsuspecting Nelly--"Just where were you all living?" Yet they did so in ways that did not infringe upon the official definition of fascism's root causes. One outstanding exception was a study of German anti-Semitism viewed across several centuries, published by Rosemarie Schuder and Rudolf Hirsch in 1987; the larger framework allowed a degree of relativization reconcilable with the SED's self-exoneration.33
Across the Atlantic, Claudia Koonz, Renate Bridenthal, Marion Kaplan and Attina Grossmann (all evincing different yet personal ties to Germany) pursued questions of women's agency, not only in relation to the war but also with regard to female anti-Semitism in the decade preceding fascism.34 Koonz argued that the smooth functioning of the Nazi apparatus depended upon women's full cooperation: housewives boycotted Jewish stores, shunned non-Aryan neighbors, allowed their children to join the Hitler Jugend and even reported regime-critical acquaintances to authorities. The forces of internal resistance had similarly depended upon women's "performance" of their day-to-day roles, like delivering contraband literature packed into baby carriages. From this vantage point, the victim-perpetrator thesis poses a special dilemma for feminist analysts once the question of resistance is raised: if there are gender-specific sources of "good," resulting in courageous acts of Widerstand (resistance) among women, then the latter must also possess some independent capacity for "evil." To claim that women had simply caved in to the orders of Nazi men would otherwise imply that they had also largely followed men's commands when it came to acts of resistance.
In summary, a select group of 1980s experts challenged earlier feminist theories that women bore no unique responsibility for the Nazi exterminations and that all women were the ultimate victims of fascist oppression (some more directly than others). These challenges to the prevailing feminist memory frameworks did not provoke a public debate of the magnitude witnessed by its male equivalent (as least as far as media coverage goes). As noted earlier, no women featured prominently in the revisionist Historikerstreit of 1986-1987. Their noninvolvement can be partially explained by way of Gerda Lerner's 1979 thesis involving the placement of women in history: analysts of the 1980s had only reached the second phase of feminist historicization, namely, that of conceptualizing women's "contributions" to history in a narrative still dominated by male actors (stage one consists of "finding" women to write about!). By the 1990s they seem to have advanced to the third stage, that of "reconfiguring" and reconstructing the larger narrative, based on a better understanding of the complex ways in which gender interacts with other "independent" historical variables.35
The argument here is not that nearly all German feminists deliberately sought to avoid a much-needed confrontation with the reality of women's accommodation to the Nazi regime, but rather that the alternative explanatory frameworks just outlined would have retained their marginal character throughout the 1990s--at which point the forces of generational change might have dramatically intervened--had unification not occurred. One indication that some change was on the horizon, conditioned by the passage of time, was a conference convened in January 1990 under the rubric, "Daughters' Questions: NS-Women's History."36 In short, the forces of biology were beginning to alleviate the difficult problem of needing to reconfront one's own mother face-to-face (something a few had tried to do twenty years earlier, with catastrophic results for family ties), as activists of the '68 Generation turned forty- and fifty-something. These forces were not yet strong enough or "collective" enough, however, to precipitate a paradigm shift among a majority of feminists.
But intervene unification did--as much through the pro-democratic agitation of Eastern women as through the importuning of a "great man of history" (West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl). The former included activities undertaken in the name of the well-established Women Writers' Circle, which issued one of the first appeals for reform, and the Independent Women's League, created in autumn 1989.37 And unity has,
to the same extent for the Germans of East and West, shattered their self-perceptions as Germans ... for the ugly German can no longer be made out on the other side of the Wall. If the Westerners, for example, saw the tradition of German militarism and the authoritarian state living on in the East, the Easterners saw in the West a society that continued after Nationalism without a single break, without distancing itself. Now that is not so simple any more. The projections have to be taken back....38Unification has thus challenged women's self-understanding in fundamental historical and political ways, that is, in ways that are simultaneously intertwined with, and distinct from, questions of biological qua personal identity. The return of the repressed, under the guise of German unity, holds unique consequences and lessons for women.
Personal Lessons From History: A Tale of Different DiscoursesMy earlier research on historical consciousness and postwar German identity included an interview with Dr. Marion Dönhoff, born in Eastern Prussia on 2 December 1909. Linked to the July 20th group which tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944, Dr. Dönhoff soon emerged as a prominent FRG political voice upon joining the staff of Die Zeit (the Western state's premier weekly newspaper) in 1946. Having experienced Germany both whole and divided, Marion Dönhoff felt no need for a new FRG national consciousness, nor did she believe in the possibility of "reunification" prior to 1989. Describing herself as a German at home in Europe, she had come to embrace the Federal Republic "as the best state we ever had" by the late 1980s.39
Dönhoff's latest reflections on the past are captured in an authorized biography compiled by a prominent West German feminist, Alice Schwarzer (born in 1942). Though their respective generations clashed head-on under the old Federal Republic, these two women have recently discovered common ground regarding "questions of responsibility and morality in democracy."40 Both seem persuaded that militarism, nationalism and an unassailable Wille zur Macht (drive for power) are no longer natural components of German identity. The lesson Dönhoff conveys to Schwarzer, who is sooner schooled in quasi-professional public protest, is that resistance and moral courage are usually rooted in acts of everyday life: "I did not comprehend," die Gräfin says of 1944, "that it was historically correct to do such a thing. I said to myself, 'What have I actually done? Only that which any reasonable human being should do in such a situation'...," even if resistance ultimately means the loss of one's physical Heimat (homeland).41
The understanding reached by these two women after 1990 is all the more striking when compared to another post-unity dialogue between a prominent political figure and a long-standing dissident, this time in the East, both of whom have also experienced a "difficult Fatherland" and a loss of Heimat. While unification has led Dönhoff and Schwarzer to a shared appreciation of the FRG vis-à-vis the Nazi past, it has pushed Brandenburg's Socialist Party (SPD) Social Minister Regine Hildebrandt (born 1941) and Bärbel Bohley (born 1945), a cofounder of Women for Peace and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, to discover irreconcilable differences. Women in the new Länder are likely to experience qualitatively different feelings of "guilt" and responsibility toward German history, confronted now by the need to work through two authoritarian eras.
In an interview with the two women published in 1993, Hildebrandt distinguishes between individuals who tried to "get by" within the system and those whose active collaboration with the SED resulted in direct harm to others:
I have the impression you want to turn the entire GDR world on its head. I have nothing against confronting ourselves in detail with the functions of the Church in socialism. But when it comes to working through the past, then I prefer that we concern ourselves first with the role of the SED, the Stasi and the state apparatus.... I will not allow you to destroy the Church for me by only talking about its Stasi connections.42Bohley assumes an absolutist position, mirroring the degree to which she herself is a product of all-or-nothing GDR socialization: "there exist 24 thick files on me and no one ever turned me into an Informal Collaborator [IC]. I was always an enemy of the state in these 24 files, from beginning to end. One was either an IC or not. I have to say that unequivocally."43 Small acts of "everyday resistance" are not an adequate starting point, as far as Bohley is concerned. Though her own acts of dissent might actually have been construed as heroic in the context of the 1970s, the memory she brings to bear on the GDR past in the 1990s is predominantly one of victimization.
The disagreement between Hildebrandt and Bohley over ways to master the GDR past colors the lessons each now draws in relation to the Third Reich experience. Asked whether the processing of GDR history will be neglected or rejected in the same way that a multidimensional "working through" of the Nazi era was, Hildebrandt responds "I can't see that it will happen as in 1945. The preoccupation with the most recent history has become a cultural program, so to speak, for a large part of the nation. I do believe that the ways and means [being used] make that processing very difficult...."44 Bohley sees the interplay of Germany's two pasts somewhat differently:
processing takes place today just as selectively as it did in the West in 1945. One problem is being used to deflect from another.... The past is only being used, for better or worse,... [when it should be] impelling everyone to search within himself [sic] and to decide whether he has brought legal or moral guilt upon himself.... I perceive this as the second crime.45
Bohley's rather accusatory tone illustrates the resentment many former dissidents feel over having been excluded from organs of power following die Wende (the 1989 "Turnaround"). At one point Bohley tells Hildebrandt, "I could really have a seizure now, given that you are acting as if you are the only one who travels through the country and tells the people what they need to do...."46
A further text offering a kind of de/reconstruction of collective memory, Judasfrauen by East German author Helga Schubert, examines the question of how the prosecutors of one era become the political convicts of the next.47 Commencing her research in 1985, Schubert (a prose writer of "the fatherless generation," born in 1940) reconstructed the trial records of ten real women convicted for denunciation after World War II. When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, she revised her "parable," hoping to draw lessons for processing the short-lived history of her own homeland, the GDR. Schubert countered the theme of women's "private" powerlessness by turning the abstract image of male perpetrators/female victims on its head (in nine cases, men were the ones denounced). Questioning the "statistically representative" nature of the cases presented, Sigrid Weigel, reviewing this work for a Western feminist journal, was vexed by Schubert's attempt to use examples from daily life under the Nazis as a means of exploring lessons from the GDR past, allegedly without examining her own "complicity" in the latter--as if the two were unrelated.48 For Schubert they are intricately connected: "as if under a microscope, I saw a structure that repeats itself over and over and over again."49
Schubert admittedly treats the logic of "victors' justice" rather than women's logic per se; but more unsettling than her "moral condemnation" of these individuals divorced from larger questions of gender power and gender violence is the image of women behaving reprehensibly on the basis of petty, self-serving motives, rather than on behalf of some greater cause. Aware that denunciators were also the victims of dictatorship, Schubert infers that no group can declare itself immune to betrayal and complicity "for among those responsible I got to know clever, sympathetic, well-educated and warm-hearted human beings."50
The Eastern author's effort to assess women's potential for complicity by way of a different temporal, albeit geographically and historically shared, context locates the question of women's complicity too close to home, now that German women are no longer physically divided. Recall that FRG academic Thürmer-Rohr had used a nuclear concentration camp scenario reminiscent of Hiroshima to explore women's implication--a form of contemporizing that did not draw the ire of feminists in the 1980s, though her "foregrounding" was even farther removed from the experiential world of postwar German women. Neither the remnants of fascism nor questions of female acquiescence to authoritarian rule can now be safely attributed to Germans closest to the Oder-Neisse border, physically delineating the postwar Republic from the former Reich. In short, a new, unanticipated geographical reality has suddenly superseded the palliative forces of time on collective qua national memory.
Two other East Germans are less oblique in the historical parallels they draw. Irene Runge, a publicist born of left/intellectual German-Jewish migrants who returned to "the Zone" from New York, led a relatively privileged existence as a child, first rediscovering her Jewish identity as an adult. Runge's memories of the GDR overlap with those of another East Berlin writer, Daniela Dahn, as does her irritation over a serious lack of memory displayed by the Kohl government from 1982 to mid-1998 (Kohl was known to emphasize "the blessing of late birth"). Both reflect on "this unbelievable scandal of the SS men from Lithuania who [began to draw] pensions from the FRG, because they had served for Germany [during World War II]," at the same time Bonn officials were moving to strike the pensions of known antifascists after unification because they were close to the GDR state.51 Runge further takes issue with the renaming of Eastern streets--an official vehicle for reshaping collective memory--"as if the communists hanged by the Nazis were suddenly no longer heroes. [The West Germans] are making an effort to clean things up as if one can wipe away the past."52 Daniela Dahn (whose grandmother was Jewish) offers many detailed accounts of former Nazi officials, or their widows, awarded special pensions since unity, at the same time Eastern resistance fighters have had theirs denied or stripped away. Collective memory, thus defined by way of revised government welfare policy, continues to follow an "astoundingly ideological" line: "One month of imprisonment in a GDR prison brings 550 D-Marks. One month in a [Nazi] concentration camp brings a total of 150 D-Marks," deeply offending the historical sensitivities of many East Germans.53
Neither of these women view the Eastern components of their personal/political identities as a barrier to a new national identity encompassing both positive and negative features: "One has to live in Germany with Germany, and not only in practical terms but also theoretically." Practically speaking, Runge writes, "I've had to learn how to get through daily life all over again.... planning for old age, theater, movies, cosmetics, meeting places...."54 Living with Germany theoretically means admitting that one has to embrace the nation in spite of its past: "if you can't say yes to yourself, then that means always saying no to the others.... You don't have to [say you are] proud to be a German. But the reaction cannot be, above all, that because of Auschwitz nobody can be a German, there is no German homeland."55 The problem, as these two Eastern women see it, is that rather than renegotiate the parameters of collective memory and historical responsibility in response to new conditions, West Germans would prefer to apply their own model to both peoples, and then be done with it.
The need to reinfuse German his-and-herstory with a common meaning for citizens throughout the enlarged FRG has forced questions of female responsibility onto the center stage in two respects. Beyond a few exceptions, GDR women had few regular opportunities to dialogue openly and candidly with FRG women about National Socialist history before the Wall fell. Yet just as importantly, Western feminists tended to eschew responsibility for a new dictatorship right across the border, preferring to agitate for the rights of Third World women. As one scholar observes rather harshly, "female citizens in the old FRG neither made the revolution happen, nor did they even want one."56
New Left-cum-feminist support for the Prague Spring of 1968, for instance, was virtually nonexistent, owing to a self-absorbed interest in the FRG/USA/Vietnam connection. Fixated as many were on a leftist utopia far removed from GDR daily life, they did little during the two decades after their own cultural revolution of 1968 to combat the state oppression faced by "sisters" next door. Notable exceptions were Westerners Eva Quistorp and Petra Kelly, both feminist/Green/peace-movement activists who cofounded the border-transcending Women for Peace organization and interacted personally with dissidents like Bohley. As a rule, FRG feminists did even less, it seems, than their once culpable mothers who sent packages and kept candles burning in their front windows--in memory of the new victims of dictatorship--throughout the 1950s and 1960s. This implies that Eastern women are not the only ones who need to come to terms with two authoritarian German pasts.
Which German Nation? A New Crisis of Herstorical IdentityGDR women had fewer grounds to mobilize around feminist themes than their FRG peers prior to the system's collapse, given the many public policies which had enabled them to combine career and family (though the state's intentions were more pro-natalist than emancipatory in character). They also had fewer reasons to challenge their relation to the National Question, having paid for fascism in ways that Western feminists often failed to count, e.g. through a deprivation of fundamental political freedoms in exchange for collective exculpation. At no time did GDR opposition groups seek to justify their pro-democracy struggle in terms of the "moral superiority" of the FRG historical paradigm. Unification was embraced not as an end per se but as a means for attaining other intensely desired changes.
Feminist reactions to rapid unification may well have sprung, to borrow from Joppke, "from a rational perception that the civic and the national dimensions of the East German revolution did not coincide."57 FRG citizens who perceived their own political and economic institutions as patriarchal to the core could not have welcomed their imposition on Eastern women. This did not stop them from hoping that once the merger had occurred, the GDR experience might provide a few institutional correctives (e.g. legalized abortion), since most knew very little about the unidimensional character of antifascism imposed from above or the duplicitous nature of equal-rights policies (verlogene Gleichberechtigung) prior to the Wall's collapse.
Women on both sides are now absorbed with the disadvantages each group has itself encountered as a result of unification. A general polarization of West and East identities (codeword: "the Wall in one's head") and particular tensions between the identities of Eastern and Western feminists (codeword: "Stepsisters") confirm my mid-1980s hypothesis that the German nation had indeed become little more than an "imagined community" by 1990.58
Eastern women still have more trouble "feeling German" than men: according to one poll, 30-40 percent of the former, versus 40-60 percent of the males, perceive themselves as deutsch first and foremost.59 This is not to say that they felt any more love for the old Father-State than for the new one. One woman, interviewed in 1992, ruminated,
It is usually men, the ones who are in power, who express themselves regarding the state of the nation.... I, a woman, without power--and on top of that, one from the East--would sooner have to intone a lamentation. One expects me to be happy about belonging to the bigger Germany, so experienced in democracy and the market economy. But I feel alien in this nation, in this Fatherland....60
Another admitted: "When I now hear all this national clanging, this Deutschland über alles, I don't feel like I belong to it. I don't want to belong to it but I belong to it. Sometimes I think I just have to endure it, being German."61
Feelings of ethnic solidarity are perhaps a necessary but by no means a sufficient condition for nationhood, since identity is never unidimensional. The significance of blood and soil pales when compared with the importance of societal context in defining the contours of national identity and, with that, collective memory--which not only derives from the former but also serves its contemporary purposes.62 While ethnic identities require no specific historical beginning and end point, a truly national identity depends not only upon memory but also upon shared encounters with the present coupled with the desire to work for a common future. While the Germans of East and West may "possess" the same national past, they do not yet ascribe to a common interpretation of that history.
Despite a clear reluctance on the part of (mostly male) FRG elites to reimagine united Germany's consciousness, a few good women have set out to reexamine gender-specific linkages between past and present manifestations of extremism. Birgit Rommelspacher was one of the first to link new patterns of racism and ultranationalism emerging among post-Wall women to diversity problems among German feminists at present, as well as to their fundamental identity-complex vis-à-vis the national past.63 This is not to argue that FRG women had eschewed any and all discussion of racism in their midst prior to 1989. Some feminists did initiate a highly divisive debate along these lines as early as 1981, though it also retained a rather marginal character until the 1990s.64
The rhetoric of German feminists has been touched by (but not directly adopted from) far-right discourses reinvoking categories of ethnicity and nationality. Their increasing use of the term "the white German women's movement"--though intended to accord recognition to diversity--is quite problematic, in my judgment.65 This racialized construct appears to have been "borrowed" from US feminists, as indicated by frequent references to Audre Lorde and bel hooks. US racism, symbolically grounded in skin color, is rooted in the unique historical experience of institutionalized slavery. The latter classification can no more be applied to the FRG's treatment of Afro-Germans, Turkish workers, or Balkan asylum-seekers than the prolonged if haphazard extermination of Native Americans can be equated with the concentrated, systematic atrocities of the Holocaust. It is doubtful that refugees from Bosnia, or even Roma and Sinti women, consider themselves "people of color." The real debate that needs to take place in the post-unity Republic is rooted in the age-old, spurious blood-based distinction between Germans and foreigners as refracted through the complexities of gender, race and class.
Equally disturbing is their emerging self-recognition and demarcation as white-German-Christian feminists vis-à-vis genuinely religious female adherents to non-Christian faiths, in particular; few feminist activists are practicing members of any (allegedly patriarchal) institutionalized religion. A stress on the Christian component of European culture opens the door to the irreconcilability of Jewish/German/Islamic identities; it moreover underscores the historical fact that German women did not resist the collaboration of "their" churches with the Nazis. A hasty effort to accommodate multiple or multicultural gender identities before they have come to terms with their own Germanness leaves feminists no more exculpated than before: For it is "no solution now to elevate black, Jewish or other women as messengers of truth ... that is, to new organs of conscience, in order to overcome, finally, German confusion, guilt and ignorance."66
At least two post-Wende conferences illustrate how quickly old feelings of "shame" and "guilt" are rekindled when Jewish, black or migrant women attempt to carve out their own spaces in the contemporary German debate. One such meeting took place near Würzburg in January 1990 on the subject of "Participation and Resistance" (sponsored by the German Youth-Research Institute and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, inter alia); the symposium brought together 60 participants from the FRG, GDR and Austria. The conference embodied an "almost forced effort" to create a false sense of harmony; researchers were confronted with "what they didn't want to thematize," albeit in ways "devoid of factual content."67 A second conference convened in Cologne during November 1990, titled "Women against Nationalism, Racism, Anti-Semitism, Sexism," was also marked by division and denial. Black women marched out of the plenary session in protest against a concentration on East-West division and a commensurate neglect of North/South differences. "White German women" reportedly responded with rationalizations, irritation and "helpless silence," not real dialogue. Verbal reactions that seem to blame or exonerate the dominant group intensify the painful nature of the confrontation, which rapidly assumes a personal-as-political character. This process triggers further responses along the lines of "I have problems with you attacking us like this" or "German? I don't want anything to do with that."68 One East German, unwittingly perhaps, pinpointed the special dilemma facing women in her part of the country: "Duplicitous equality--the abandonment of emancipation--antifascism imposed from above--repressed history, and now on top of it, discredited antifascism--water for the mill of neofascism. One has to endure these contradictions, and allow no more repressing...."69
An extraordinary resurgence of right-extremist violence was not long in coming (1991-1993), though I have demonstrated elsewhere that unity was sooner a catalyst than a cause of such outbursts; the latter are rooted in sources of discontent going back to the early 1980s.70 Ironically, post-unity racism, found both inside established antinational women's movements and more recent ultranationalist groupings, shares the same anti-Semitic component:
Through Jews and Jewesses one does battle against the remembrance of National Socialist history, for they are the ones who remind [us] of it. So their memorials must also be destroyed, in order to erase the remembrance. This destruction nonetheless has a symptomatic character, that is, it points exactly to that which it would like to have un-happen. Thus the sickness connected to it is continuously reproduced. And this is countered with a spiteful declaration, "I am proud to be a German."
Or, one's Germanness is totally negated: I am no German. Such denials are also part of a leftist or even feminist history-suppressed which refuses to admit the true significance of national identity out of fear that unadulterated national pride might be the only answer to this question ... the consequence of an unprocessed history is a polarization, in the form of a forced identity, on the one hand, and a denial of one's Deutsch-sein [being German] to the point of self-hatred, on the other. And in this polarization contradictions mutually exacerbate each other, deflecting a confrontation with one's own history and with one's self-understanding.71
The latter reaction, denial, is especially characteristic of "the '68ers." The former reaction, pride resurgent, is more typical of young Germans, female and male, who feel socially and economically threatened by the twin forces of unification and globalization.
Prior to unification, German feminists seemed little inclined to initiate a dialogue with youth of extremist bent (although such groups did exist prior to 1989), owing no doubt to the ambivalence most felt toward the National Question itself. Self-avowed feminists interviewed by this author during the mid-1980s not only regularly critiqued "the system's" failure to process the collective past but also faulted the older generation for its refusal to accept full personal responsibility for fascist atrocities.72 Few seemed to recognize the contradiction inherent in their own "distance" from die Nation, insofar as the inclination "to shame oneself for belonging to the nation, the German one, stems from the same mythical consciousness as pride in being German...."73 Nor did they anticipate the extent to which "too little" personal identification and national pride on the part of their own generation might trigger an antithetical response, "too much" longing for a strong nation, among members of the next generation, a problem common to other stages of German history.74
The Generational DivideFransiska Tenner's post-1990 experiences testify further to the deflective consequences of polarization. Abandoned by her leftist friends for researching the political motives of neo-Nazi women after unification, she closes the circle drawn by Rommelspacher with the argument, "As the consequence of an insufficient and incomplete processing of history, because of the [rest of German society's] dishonest confrontation with German fascism, the Nazis today are able to claim for themselves the right to doubt all existing historical [re]presentations."75
The polarization concerns of both authors point to the emergence of a new generation gap, this time not between actual Nazi "collaborators" and their biological offspring but between the "mothers" of feminism and their metaphorical "daughters." In an earlier work I developed the concept of Femi-Nazis (expropriated from Rush Limbaugh) to suggest that there is a unique connection between three decades of feminist mobilization in the FRG and the self-conscious embrace of far-right orientations among female adolescents in united Germany.76 Females of the New Right have embraced a concept of equal rights at odds with the essentialist elements of ultranationalist ideology; yet select members of the successor generation are opting to use their self-assertive women's consciousness to benefit extremist and exclusionary political agendas.
At first glance, the New Right's misogynist rhetoric and ideals render female participation in extremist movements something of a paradox. It is generally assumed that women will exclude themselves from violence-prone groups due to their own socialization.77 Yet if one accepts the oft-repeated argument that feelings of social inferiority and economic insecurity among the "losers" of unification are the driving forces behind the extremist cause, then women should be even more attracted to these movements.78 New data generated by feminist scholars indicate that young women are attracted to ultra-right ideologies for reasons not found among their male counterparts. One survey of nearly 300 apprentices in Lower Saxony found that a majority of the female participants evinced xenophobic, as distinct from nationalistic, tendencies. Experts in that region concluded that intolerant, anti-foreigner sentiments may be the means by which female extremists vent their frustrations over gender inequality per se.79
Ironically, many women of the New Right see their own behavior as the logical extension of feminism's self-empowering legacy. German Women's Front (DFF) leader Lisa Wohlschläger insists:
I see myself as a National Socialist. But at the same time I am ... emancipated through and through.... Look at the '68 wave. I mean, for us it was positive, we profit from it, participate through it.... But you can't, like many radical Emanzen want to imagine, give in to the illusion, that you can overthrow the patriarchy over the next few years. It will take thousands of years....80It is equally ironic that this "emancipated" neo-Nazi echoes the ambivalence of many feminists concerning women's relationship to war and environmental destruction:
if women could determine the world order, then we would all live with much greater environmental consciousness, then more social justice would prevail.... I am convinced that we would have been able to skip several wars, if women had been in power.... On the other hand, I tell myself that women have also contributed to a certain degree. Wars were also fought because of women.81
In attributing to women a special sensitivity to ecological preservation, as well as a unique capacity for Friedfertigkeit or peacefulness, Wohlschläger overlaps with feminists who rallied in opposition to nuclear energy and the NATO nuclear deployments of the 1980s.82 A willingness among prominent Femi-Nazis to recognize their debt to the feminist movement raises the intriguing question as to what responsibility the latter might bear for women's participation in this new extraparliamentary opposition movement.83 If feminist scholars admit that women of the New Right--young enough to be their daughters--are motivated by forces of little relevance to men, and if they stand by their assertion of the 1970s that women are to be viewed as subjects capable of pursuing their own political agenda, then they must necessarily reexamine questions of agency and self-interest with regard to women of the Old Right--the generation of their mothers.
Conclusion: The German Question as GretchenfrageThe existence of two German states, sustained by hostile ideological camps and superpowers, deprived GDR women of a language enabling them to "think in alternatives," insofar as the Nazi experience cast its shadow over all references to a nonsocialist nation.84 Yet it also offered a source of "comfort" for many Eastern citizens by way of organized forgetting. The gradual but permanent embrace of individualism in the pre-unity FRG, grounded in an understanding of the Rechtsstaat (rule of law) that placed greater emphasis on citizen rights (Recht) than on the well-being of the state (Staat) itself, further undermined the prospect of sustaining a shared collective memory--despite the constraints that a simplified, external collective memory (sustained by neighboring states) continued to impose on both Germanys through 1989.
The one dimension of national consciousness Eastern and Western women shared over a span of four decades was a (not always personal) recollection of the atrocities committed both in the name of and with the ostensible acquiescence of das deutsche Volk. Given the quintessentially negative character of their common reference point, feminists, especially, will find it hard to cultivate their own positive identification with the nation-united as long as they refuse to seek new linkages between nationalism and democratic self-determination. Adding to their difficulty is the increasingly depersonalized nature of this shared reference point, since by 1989 some two-thirds of all German citizens had been born after the war.
I concur wholeheartedly with Markovits and Reich that
the politics of collective memory--impossible to quantify, hard to measure with the methods of survey research, yet still very real--is a major ingredient of the political arena, the public discourse, and the policy setting in every country. It circumscribes the acceptable. It defines such key ingredients as pride, shame, fear, revenge, and comfort for a large number of a country's citizens. It is central to an understanding of the forces of nationalism.85
This treatment of mothers, daughters and the fascist experience confirms the existence of "competing generations of collective memories"-- fractured further still by the prism of gender--"which are not linear and progressive but circular, repetitious and profoundly unpredictable."86
Women's efforts to come to terms with Germany's traumatic past and to forge a collective memory conducive to a democratic future have been complicated by the fact that their struggles to participate equally in core national debates were rooted in opposing ideological systems between 1949 and 1989. Taking the Markovits/Reich argument a step further, I contend that it is ideology which has predefined the parameters of German collective memory from the outset. In this sense, female identities caught between the personal and the political lie at the heart of a clash between the recently "unified" cultures of East and West. Though most manifestations may be limited to the activist community, the personal-political nexus does affect women's ties to Germany's ignominious national past, delineates their strategies for coping with the present and conditions their future prospects for joining forces in pursuit of gender equality.
Ongoing tensions between Eastern and Western feminists underscore the inadequacy of research paradigms limited to a critique of patriarchy in exploring women's role under authoritarian regimes. It is not the Germans' collective incapacity to mourn87 but rather their unwillingness to identify directly with the negative as well as with the positive components of the national past--made easy by division--which has undercut FRG feminists' ability to empathize with women in the East as well as with women of other cultures living in their midst.
National unification has brought to the fore three essential Gretchenfragen for millions of women undergoing "the years of change" in both a political and a biological sense.88 First and foremost, feminists over the age of 45 face the difficult question, how do I stand regarding the guilt of my mother, relative to that of my father? 89 In other words, what would each have done in her mother's place? Secondly, what steps have women undertaken, as distinct from those initiated by men, to address questions of collective guilt and responsibility since 1945? And finally, to what extent and in what ways have women in both parts of Germany passed on to the next generation their own devices for avoiding or suppressing questions of national guilt?
The lesson emerging from this analysis is that feminists in the nation-united will have to accept their identity as German women, and all the historical continuity that implies (no doubt easier said than done). National identity is more than an accident of birth, embraced instrumentally in order to secure civil-service jobs, generous vacation benefits and state pensions. Historical analyses exonerating women from "national" responsibility, it is worth noting, can just as easily be used to discriminate against women as to position them for rewards.
Individuals comprising the Second Wave of German feminism came of political age during the era of détente, when both postwar states felt certain that they had shed the aggressively ethno-national components of their respective identities and, hence, could begin to transcend the pulls of history by way of a future-oriented community of responsibility rooted in peace.90 By this time the respective citizens of the GDR and the FRG had already partially internalized their quasi-national identities tied to the existence of separate states. In order to forge a more perfect, fundamentally democratic union of citizens, antisexist and antiracist activists must now ally themselves with the principle of civic nationalism--a concept that requires a substantial liberalization of citizenship requirements in the Federal Republic (Staatsbürgerschaft), a move supported by all of the women in the new Schröder Cabinet as of 1998.91
A limited but sensational female mobilization on behalf of right-extremist causes, coupled with the phenomenon of unification itself, has contributed to a paradigm shift among German feminist scholars since 1990. It is no coincidence, however, that many investigations centering on New Right women are being conducted by members of the first Post-Wall Generation.92 Nor is it coincidental that this research is taking place under the direction of self-avowed feminist professors of the Long March Generation. Younger women may not feel particularly blessed by virtue of their having been born either "late" or female, but they do evince a quality some have labeled "the New Unencumberedness." Among their predecessors, "The guilt-blocking mechanisms still function.... The past continues to have its effect on individual and collective subconsciousness...."93 A reluctance to debate questions of women's political agency in contemporary extremist movements will only make a "return to the nation" more difficult for those of feminist persuasion. For as Christa Wolf learned by way of her own examination of the fascist experience in Kindheitsmuster, "die Vergangenheit ist nicht tot; sie ist nicht einmal vergangen": the past is not dead; it has not even passed.
Notes
1. Andrei S. Markovits and Simon Reich, The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1997), xiii.
2. Katherine Verdery, "Whither 'Nation' and 'Nationalism'?," Daedalus 122 (1993): 41.
3. Christian Joppke, "Intellectuals, Nationalism, and the Exit from Communism: The Case of East Germany," Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 2 (1995): 218.
4. Ibid., 215.
5. Ibid., 221.
6. Charles S. Maier, "Jenseits des Historikerstreits: The Significance of the Historikerstreit," German Politics and Society 13 (1988): 4.
7. Thomas Münzer was a key figure supporting the Peasant Wars of the 16th century (directly opposed by Martin Luther), allegedly a prototype for the proletarian revolutions of the early 20th century, as the SED "read" history; Frederick the Great was responsible for the political-administrative modernization of Germany, resulting in the expansion of Prussia by way of diplomacy and military conquest; Ernst Thälmann, who headed the Communist Party at the end of the Weimar Republic and was heralded throughout GDR history as a socialist resistance fighter, was executed at Buchenwald in 1944 after 11 years of internment; Joseph Goebbels was propagandist-in-chief for the National Socialists (NSDAP).
8. Joppke, "Intellectuals, Nationalism." For biographical summaries on Wolf and Seghers, see the entries by Joyce M. Mushaben and Ulrich Scheck, respectively, in Dieter K. Buse and Juergen C. Doerr, eds., Modern Germany: An Encyclopedia of History, People, and Culture, 1871-1990 (New York/London, 1998).
9. Joppke, "Intellectuals, Nationalism," 221.
10. Claudia Koppert, "Schuld und Schuldgefühle im westlichen Nachkriegsdeutschland: Zu Wirksamkeit des Vergangenen im Gegenwärtigen?" Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis 30/31 (1991): 220.
11. Known simply as "the Speech," Richard von Weizsäcker's address of 8 May 1985 appears in English in Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, 1986), 262-73.
12. Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung, cited in Koppert, "Schuld und Schuldgefühle," 221.
13. Ibid., 225.
14. Claudia Wolff, cited in ibid., 226.
15. Ibid., 219.
16. Annemarie Tröger, "Die Dolchstoßlegende der Linken: 'Frauen haben Hitler an die Macht gebracht'," Frauen und Wissenschaft, Berliner Sommeruniversität (July 1976): 324-55.
17. Birgit Rommelspacher, "Rassismus im Interesse von Frauen?" Zeitschrift für Frauenforschung 1/2 (1994): 32.
18. Ibid.
19. Frigga Haug, Frauenformen: Alltagsgeschichten und Entwurf einer Theorie weiblicher Sozialisation (Berlin, 1980); also, Frauen--Opfer oder Täter? Diskussion (Berlin/Hamburg, 1988). The negative characterization stems from (but is not supported by) Britta Ruth Büchner, Rechte Frauen, Frauenrechte und Klischees der Normalität: Gespräche mit "Republikanerinnen" (Pfaffenweiler, 1995).
20. Margarete Mitscherlich, Die friedfertige Frau: Eine psycho-analytische Untersuchung zur Aggression der Geschlechter (Frankfurt/Main, 1985).
21. Christina Thürmer-Rohr, "Aus der Täuschung in die Ent-Täuschung: Zur Mittätershaft von Frauen," reprinted in idem, ed., Vagabundinnen: Feministische Essays (1983; Berlin, 1987).
22. Karin Windaus-Walser, "Gnade der weiblichen Geburt? Zum Umgang der Frauenforschung mit Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus," Feministische Studien, no. 1 (1988): 102-115.
23. Gerda Szepansky, Frauen leisten Widerstand: 1933-45 (Frankfurt/Main, 1983); see also her "Blitzmädel", "Heldenmutter", "Kriegwitwe"--Frauenleben im zweiten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt/Main, 1986).
24. Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen, 1986).
25. Frauen gegen Antisemitismus AG, "Der Nationalsozialismus als Extremform des Patriarchats: Zur Leugnung der Täterschaft von Frauen und zur Tabuisierung des Antisemitismus in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem NS," Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis 35 (1993): 77-89.
26. Angelika Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen: Frauenbiographien des Nationalsozialismus, Schriften der Hamburger Stiftung für Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (1987).
27. This insight regarding the fate of Scholz-Klink derives from a personal conversation with Gabriele Steckmeister in Berlin during the summer of 1996.
28. Windaus-Walser, "Gnade der weiblichen Geburt?" 106.
29. Rommelspacher, "Rassismus im Interesse von Frauen?" 40.
30. Frauen gegen Anti-Semitismus AG, "Der Nationalsozialismus als Extrem-form des Patriarchats," 81.
31. Marion Kaplan, "Sisterhood under Siege: Feminism and Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1904-1938," in Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984), 174-96.
32. Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster (Berlin, 1976); Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz (Berlin, 1941).
33. Rosemarie Schuder and Rudolf Hirsch, Der Gelbe Fleck: Wurzeln und Wirkungen des Judenhasses in der deutschen Geschichte (Berlin, 1987).
34. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (London, 1988); Bridenthal, Kaplan and Grossmann, eds., When Biology Became Destiny.
35. Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York, 1979).
36. Juliane Jacobi, "TöchterFragen zur NS-Frauen-Geschichte," Feministische Studien, no. 1 (1992): 141-45.
37. Ingrid Miethe, "Das Politikverständnis bürgerbewegter Frauen der DDR im Prozess der deutschen Vereinigung," Zeitschrift für Frauenforschung 14, no. 3 (1996): 87-101.
38. Rommelspacher, "Rassismus im Interesse von Frauen?" 36.
39. Since 1990 Dr. Dönhoff has openly criticized "the directionless Bonn leadership," both for refusing to pursue pressing reform needs throughout the FRG and for failing to develop effective strategies for reconciling East and West Germans. See Marion Grafin Dönhoff, Weil das Land Versöhnung braucht and Weil das Land sich ändern muß, both published by Rowohlt, the first in 1993, the second in 1992. For the complete interview, see Joyce Marie Mushaben, From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Attitudes towards the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany (Boulder, CO, 1998), 278-81.
40. Alice Schwarzer, Marion Dönhoff: Ein widerständiges Leben (Cologne, 1996), 229ff.
41. Schloss Friedrichstein, an estate worked by the Dönhoff family for 700 years, burned to the ground in 1945 in conjunction with the arrival of the Soviet Army in Eastern Prussia.
42. "Es gibt unterschiedliche Wahrheiten: Streitgespräch zwischen Bärbel Bohley und Regine Hildebrandt über die Zukunftsperspektiven in Ost und West, über Vergangenheitsbewaltigung und die Rolle der Kirche in der DDR," Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte 1 (1993): 9-10. (Stasi is the colloquial name for the secret State Security Police.)
43. Ibid., 12.
44. Ibid., 17.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 6-7.
47. Helga Schubert, Judasfrauen: Zehn Fallgeschichten weiblicher Denunziation im Dritten Reich (Berlin, 1990). For interesting comparisons among women GDR writers of the first and second generations, see Fritz H. Koenig, "Short Prose by Female GDR Writers," GDR Bulletin 17, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 13-16.
48. Sigrid Weigel, "'Judasfrauen': Sexualbilder im Opfer-Täter-Diskurs über den Nationalsozialismus," Feministische Studien, no. 1 (1992): 121-31.
49. Schubert, Judasfrauen, 10-11.
50. Ibid., 9.
51. Runge, in Margarete Mitscherlich and Irene Runge, Der Einheitsschock: Die Deutschen suchen eine neue Identität (Düsseldorf, 1995), 55.
52. Ibid., 62.
53. Daniela Dahn, Westwärts und nicht vergessen: Vom Unbehagen in der Einheit (Berlin, 1996), 45.
54. Mitscherlich and Runge, Der Einheitsschock, 113-15.
55. Ibid., 75, 78.
56. Ursula Schröter, "Ostdeutsche Frauen im Transformationsprozeß: Eine soziologische Analyse zur sozialen Situation ostdeutscher Frauen (1990-1994)," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 12 May 1995, 35; also, Joyce Marie Mushaben, "Second-Class Citizenship and Its Discontents: Women in United Germany," in Peter Merkl, ed., The Federal Republic of Germany at Forty-Five (New York, 1995), 82ff.
57. Joppke, "Intellectuals, Nationalism," 230.
58. Katrin Rohnstock, ed., Stiefschwester: Was Ost-Frauen und West-Frauen voneinander denken (Frankfurt/Main, 1994); see also Mushaben, From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations, especially chap. 6.
59. Schröter, "Ostdeutsche Frauen," 37.
60. Ibid., 38.
61. Ibid.
62. Indeed, membership in a national community defined in terms of jus sanguinis should immediately invoke the resistance of feminists, for maintaining "the purity of the race" is a task inevitably delegated to the nation's women, as Bosnia clearly demonstrates.
63. For a lengthier collection of her reflections, see Birgit Rommelspacher, Dominanzkultur: Texte zu Fremdheit und Macht (Berlin, 1995).
64. Sara Lennox, "Divided Feminism: Women, Racism, and German National Identity," German Studies Review 18, no. 3 (1995): 481-502.
65. This term is often invoked in a book by Olga Uremovic and Gundula Oerter, eds., Frauen zwischen Grenzen: Rassismus und Nationalismus in der feministischen Diskussion (Frankfurt/Main, 1994); see also Petra Wlecklik, ed., Frauen und Rechtsextremismus (Göttingen, 1995).
66. Koppert, "Schuld und Schuldgefühle," 228.
67. Margot Komann, "'Beteiligung und Widerstand': Kritische Glosse zum Symposium," Feministische Studien, no. 2 (1990): 143-45; see further, Ursula Aumüller-Roske, "Beteiligung und Wiederstand: Thematisierungen des Nationalsozialismus in der neueren Frauenforschung," ibid., 139-43.
68. Koppert, "Schuld und Schuldgefühle," 218.
69. Anke Schaefer, "NS-Geschichte hautnah: Reflexionen über eine Konferenz 'Beteiligung und Widerstand'," Feministische Studien, no. 2 (1990): 145-46.
70. Mushaben, From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations, especially chap. 7.
71. Rommelspacher, "Rassismus im Interesse von Frauen?" 36-37.
72. Mushaben, From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations, especially chap. 2.
73. Koppert, "Schuld und Schuldgefühle," 227.
74. Rudolf Von Thadden, "Das Schwierige Vaterland," in Werner Weidenfeld, ed., Die Identität der Deutschen (Darmstadt, 1983), 53ff.
75. Fransiska Tenner, Ehre, Blut und Mutterschutz: Getarnt unter Nazi-Frauen heute (Berlin, 1994), 242.
76. Joyce Marie Mushaben, "The Rise of Femi-Nazis? Women and Extremism in United Germany," German Politics 2 (1996): 240-61.
77. Peter Ogrzall, "Rechtsextremismus--ein Jungen/Männerproblem?" Jugendarbeit gegen Rechtsextremismus (Berlin, 1990).
78. Birgit Meyer, "Offene Fragen zum Thema: Frauen und Rechtsextremismus," Feministische Studien, no. 2 (1993): 117-27.
79. "Gender and Ideology: Study Finds That Rightwing Extremism Is Not Specific to Males," The Week in Germany, 10 Dec. 1993; see also Hilde Utzmann-Krombholz, "Rechtsextremismus und Gewalt: Affinitäten und Resistenzen von Mädchen und junge Frauen," Zeitschrift für Frauenforschung 1/2 (1994): 6-31; Mädchen und/oder/mit/gegen Gewalt, commissioned by Federal Ministry for Women and Youth, no. 3 (Berlin, 1994).
80. Tenner, Ehre, Blut und Mutterschutz, 193-94.
81. Ibid., 194; see also Mitscherlich, Die friedfertige Frau.
82. Herrad Schenk, Frauen kommen ohne Waffen (Munich, 1983).
83. Mushaben, "The Rise of Femi-Nazis?"
84. Joppke, "Intellectuals, Nationalism," 215-16.
85. Markovits and Reich, The German Predicament, 9.
86. Ibid.
87. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverley R. Placzek (New York, 1975).
88. The "Gretchen Question," used metaphorically to imply a question of ultimate moral responsibility, derives from Goethe's rendition of Dr. Faustus. Faust impregnates then abandons his young love Margarete, who drowns the child and is herself eternally damned.
89. Jacobi, "TöchterFragen zur NS-Frauen-Geschichte," 141-45.
90. Joyce Marie Mushaben, "Peace and the National Question: A Study of the Development of an Association of Responsibility between the Two Germanys," Coexistence: A Review of East-West and Development Issues 24 (1987): 245-70.
91. I am well aware of the feminist critiques of civil society and civic culture defined in conventional (malestream) terms. The civic-culture construct, espoused by Almond and Verba in the early 1960s, was grounded in a "universally applicable" assumption, which blurred the lines between the normative, empirical and day-to-day-practice aspects of democracy. Space constraints preclude a treatment of those concerns here. For details, see Carole Pateman, "The Civic Culture: A Philosophical Critique," in Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston/Toronto, 1980), 57-102.
92. Tenner, Ehre, Blut und Mutterschutz; Ursula Birsl, "Frauen und Rechtsextremismus," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 3-4 (1992): 22-30; Büchner, Rechte Frauen, Frauenrechte und Klischees der Normalität.
93. Koppert, "Schuld und Schuldgefühle," 217.
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