The Holocaust and the modernization of gender: A historiographical essay

Central European History

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 349-364

  Allen, Ann Taylor ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 24344434987     PISSN: 00089389     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0008938900014473     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York: 1989).
2. Cf. Joan Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (December, 1986)
3. reprinted in Joan Wallach Scott, ed., Feminism and History (New York 1996), 152-82.
4. Bauman, Modernity, 153.
5. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1995; original edition New York, 1944), 3-6 and passim.
6. Max Horkheimer, "Authority and the Family," in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell et al. (New York, 1972), 116-28.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 2 vols., translated and with an introduction by J. B. Baillie (London, 1910), 2:445.
8. Horkheimer, "Authority," 114. I am greatly indebted to Mechthild Rumpf, "Mystical Aura: Imagination and Reality of the 'Maternal' in Horkheimer's Writings," in On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, and John McCole (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 309-34.
9. For example: Karin Hausen, "Die Polarisierung der Geschlechtscharaktere - Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben," in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart, 1976), 363-93;
10. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds., Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis, 1987). The latter collection contains responses to critical theory by a group of feminist sociologists, philosophers, and political theorists, some of whom are widely published elsewhere.
11. Emmanuel Lévinas, "Transcendence and Height," in Emmanuel Lévinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, Indiana, 1996), 17.
12. Cf. Joan B. Landes, "The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration," in Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. Johanna Meehan (New York, 1993). 91-116.
13. Cf. Axel Honneth, "The Other of Justice: Habermas and the Ethical Challenge of Postmodernism," in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge, 1995), 289-324. "Genetically speaking, however, the experience of this moral principle precedes the encounter with all other moral points of view because ... it stands at the beginning of the child's developmental process. Indeed, it may be the case that a sensorium for what can be called, in an unrestricted sense, equal treatment can only be developed in the first place if one's own person has had the experience of unlimited care at some time" (p. 318).
14. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1993), 93.
15. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996), 242.
16. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis, 1987).
17. Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (New York, 1975);
18. Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (Princeton, 1978).
19. Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society, 185-99.
20. Rupp, Mobilizing Women, 167-81.
21. Renate Wiggershaus, Frauen unterm Nationalsozialismus, (Wuppertal, 1984), 152.
22. Other examples of early historiography are: Annette Kuhn and Valentine Rothe, Frauen im deutschen Faschismus, 2 vols. (Düsseldorf, 1984);
23. Rita Thalmann, Etre femme dans le troisième Reich (Paris, 1981).
24. A full summary and discussion of this literature is: Dagmar Reese and Carola Sachsse, "Frauenforschung und Nationalsozialismus: Eine Bilanz," in Töchter Fragen: NS Frauengeschichte, ed. Lerke Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1990), 73-106.
25. Brigitte Bruns, "Nationalsozialismus," in Frauen-Handlexicon: Stichworte zur Selbstbestimmung, ed. Johanna Beyer, Franziska Lamott, and Birgit Meyer (Munich, 1982), 203-8.
26. Wiggershaus, Frauen unterm Nationalsozialismus, 103.
27. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York, 1987), 5.
28. Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nazionalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen, 1986), 461-64.
29. But for an opposing opinion see Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. Stuart MacKinnon-Evans (Oxford, Hamburg, New York, 1988), 236-38; Frevert emphasizes the importance of pronatalist measures.
30. Gisela Bock, "Gleichheit und Differenz in der nationalsozialistischen Rassenpolitik," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19 (1993): 279-81.
31. For a view of women's roles in administering euthanasia, see Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, 1995), 231-32.
32. Gisela Bock, "Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus: Bemerkungen zu einem Buch von Claudia Koonz," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 569.
33. For Koonz's response to this review see Claudia Koonz, "Erwiderung auf Gisela Bocks Rezension von 'Mothers in the Fatherland'," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 8 (1992): 394-99.
34. For a very useful summary of recent literature on women and National Socialism see Adelheid von Saldern, "Victims or Perpetrators? Controversies about the Role of Women in the Nazi State,"
35. reprinted in Nazism and German Society: 1933-1945, ed. David Crew (London and New York, 1994), 141-65;
36. see also Reese and Sachsse, "Frauenforschung."
37. Gabriele Czarnowski, Das kontrollierte Paar: Eke und Sexualpolitik im Nationalsozialismus (Weinheim, 1989).
38. See for example Claus Füllberg-Stolberg, Martina Jung, Renate Riebe, Martina Scheitenberger, eds., Frauen in Konzentrationslagern: Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück (Bremen, 1994).
39. See also Gudrun Schwarz, "Verdrängte Täterinnen: Frauen im Apparat der SS (1939-1945)," in Nach Osten, ed. Theresa Wobbe (Frankfurt, 1992), 197-227.
40. An early and still very useful article is Sybil Milton, "Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women," in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann and Marion Kaplan (New York, 1984);
41. reprinted in Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York, 1993), 213-49.
42. Dagmar Reese, Straff aber nicht stramm, herb, aber nicht derb: Zur Vergesellschaftung von Mädchen durch den Bund deutscher Mädel im sozialkulturellen Vergleich zweier Milieus (Weinheim, 1989).
43. Elizabeth H. Tobin and Jennifer Gibson, "The Meanings of Labor: East German Women's Work in the Transition from Nazism to Communism," Central European History 28, no. 3 (1995): 301-41.
44. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge, 1991), 242.
45. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 207.
46. Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Frankfurt, 1995), 198.
47. Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christians in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, 1996).
48. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xv.
49. Cf. Rumpf, "Mystical Aura," 311.
50. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford, 1995), 258.
51. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1982);
52. Seyla Benhabib, "The Debate over Women and Moral Theory Revisited," in Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas, 231-46.
53. Seyla Benhabib, "The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory," in Feminism as Critique, ed. Benhabib and Cornell, 77-96;
54. Iris Marion Young, "Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Moral and Political Theory," in Feminism as Critique, 56-76;
55. and Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York, 1992).
56. Carol Gilligan, "Moral Orientation and Moral Development," in E. F. Kittay and Diane T. Myers, Women and Moral Theory (Totowa, 1987), 20.
57. Quoted in Seyla Benhabib, "The Debate over Moral Theory Revisited," 191-92.
58. von Saldern, "Victims or Perpetrators?"
59. Bergen, Twisted Cross.
60. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War.
61. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York, 1988), 51.