Violent Culture and Women's Agency

Hitler’s Furies:  German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies was nominated for the National Book Award, which certainly suggests that there is much to admire.  Yet the reviews I’ve looked at are not uncritical.  In particular, they (1) object to the book’s somewhat muddled organization; and (2) question how much ‘new’ historiography is at work here.  Both points have merit, I think.  In the quest to turn an academic study into a mass-market (or at least general readership) book, Lower – or her editors – jammed together new material with useful overview sections, resulting in a book that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.

Hitler’s Furies presents original archival and, in some cases, interview-generated information about a baker’s dozen of women who actively participated in Germany’s ‘expansion’ to the East and its attendant horrors.  It also raises interesting, if not absolutely novel, questions about why women served that regime.  As opposed to the widely propagated ‘Church, Children, and Kitchen’ view of the German woman, Hitler’s Furies offers another vision, also widely propagated and disseminated by the Third Reich: that of women as patriotic workers whose skills and strengths were essential to the nation’s health. The book begins with chapters framing why a significant number of German women were drawn to Nazism and denoting the categories – nurses, teachers, office workers, wives/girlfriends – into which most collaborating women fell.  It then introduces specific women.  But instead of following their lives during their ‘service’ in Poland, the Ukraine, and Belarus, the book shuffles their experiences with more general analyses of how Nazi expansionism, added to prior Weimar Republic reforms, opened lebensraum for women’s ambitions and adventurist dreams of self-realization.

 This organizational strategy prevents the featured women from becoming individualized, compelling even if contemptible, characters.  Because the case histories are not complete enough (despite the author’s impressive research) and because Lower understandably avoids ‘novelizing’ her subjects, the women remain fairly bland examples of the occupational category that they represent – not to mention that the fragmented presentation of their stories makes it hard to keep track of them, much less care about them.  Conversely, the freshly presented material about the state-sponsored allure of ‘the East’ is diluted by these life-story snippets.   In addition, it’s never clear whether Nazi women as a group were any different from Nazi men as a group – other than the fact that women usually did not have the ‘opportunity’ to join death squads or front-line military operations and thus participated in direct carnage much less frequently than did men.

Lower sensibly avoids the poster girls of Nazi depravity, such as Ilse Koch, and she also avoids the category of prison guards.  In so doing, though, she elides active (say, nurses who participated directly in ‘euthanasia’), passive (say, secretaries who typed genocidal orders), and sociopathic (say, wives who decided to use prisoners as target practice) women.  She also collapses the levels of violence surrounding these women, almost all of whom were quite young when they entered the Nazi bureaucracy in whatever way, many of whom were from small towns and their attendant restrictions, for whom even the promise of controlling and enjoying their own bodies was enticing.

 As I read Hitler’s Furies, I kept feeling a sense of unease quite different from what would be expected when reading about Nazi atrocities, organizations, and     propaganda.  What is Lower asserting about these women’s agency?  On the one       hand, she emphasizes how the women made conscious, relatively informed choices.  On the other hand, she shows how these women were entrapped in a powerful, violent ideology permeating all aspects of their lives.  So are we left with a subaltern version of the Eichmanesque just-doing-my-job justification?  Or are we invited to condemn these women as active agents in the horrors of the Holocaust?  Or just as disturbingly, to understand these women as victims themselves?  Or, as may be true for most people of whatever gender who’ve been caught up in horrific situations, are they a mix of individual decisions and environmental factors?  It’s not that there are ‘right’ answers to these questions.  It’s more that a book like Hitler’s Furies promises answers, even if they be tentative, and that this book does not provide them. 

My last criticism may fall into that dreadful pit of  ‘if I’d written this book I would have. . . .’    Caveat acknowledged, I might have paid more attention to the role that anti-Semitism played in these women’s decisions and actions.  Lower does write compellingly about how violent, scapegoating propaganda shaped German public opinion in the 1930s, when her ‘furies’ were growing up.  She even suggests how it shaped perceptions of many occupations, like nursing and teaching (preserving ‘racial hygiene’ and promoting ‘Aryan’ identity).  But these suggestions remain shadowy, as do the possibilities that omnipresent Nazi depictions of sexually depraved Jews preying upon vulnerable Nordic maidens could have influenced German women’s willingness to acquiesce to (or actively participate in) the Holocaust.

 The aporiae of Hitler’s Furies may have a positive aspect, however.  They invite additional areas of inquiry, such as how romanticizing the frontier can appeal to women raised in restrictive societies, how a regime based on violence can appeal to some women’s experience of repression/suppression, how state-sanctioned switches of ‘dangerous’ outsiders into justified recipients of violent ‘justice’ can appeal to some women’s sense of victimhood.

In brief, I’d have liked Hitler’s Furies to offer more conclusions, even if provisional, about the subject Wendy Lower has decided to tackle – conclusions based on her research, of course, and on her own judgment as a scholar and a woman.  I also think that this is a book well worth reading.  As what I assume is a ‘target reader’ – one conversant with Nazi history but not a historian as such – I did find a lot here that made me think anew about what ‘the East’ meant to Germans before and during World War Two, and to German women in particular . . . and what it means to collaborate not only in the face of unmitigated evil but also in the face of what may appear to be routine business as usual.

Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. By Wendy Lower.  New York:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.  Hardcover, paperback (forthcoming October 2014), electronic format.

[A picky and personal point: In my Kindle edition of Hitler’s Furies (in which text and notes and bibliography are in the same font), the documentary material was just about as long as the text.  Mass-market books do not have this fifty-fifty split, which may indicate that the shift from scholarly publication to general readership here was not completely thought out. 

With non-fiction books I often browse the notes and bibliography before I read the book.  Electronic editions make this cumbersome to do, and authors should be aware that more and more books are being accessed electronically.  Even with a print edition, having a gigantic back-of-the-book apparatus can imply that the book itself is a thin distillation of previous scholarship. Because there really has been a lot of previous scholarship about ordinary women’s roles in Nazi Germany, Lower might have done well to address it, and her own interventions beyond it, more directly and extensively in her book proper, before the notes and bibliography kick in.  But then we return to the question of audience and marketing . . . and whether the decisions regarding audience and marketing did justice to Lower’s research and insights.]

Good News from Nigeria

Foreign Gods, Inc.

Meet Okey Ndibe, author of a wonderful new novel, Foreign Gods, Inc.  Born in Southeastern Nigeria’s Igbo lands, Ndibe has lived and worked in the United States since the 1980s, when he emigrated to study with Chinua Achebe at Brown University.  Since then, Ndibe has held various academic posts, written a debut novel (Arrows of Rain, 2000), contributed to North American and Nigerian newspapers and journals, and worked with organizations supporting members of the African Diaspora.  Foreign Gods, Inc., I believe, is his breakthrough, a book that should move him into the first rank of contemporary African/African-Diaspora novelists.  This is good news for him; it’s also good news for readers who welcome distinctive new voices in the capacious category of  ‘World Literature.’

The ‘Foreign Gods, Inc.’ of the title refers specifically to a Manhattan art gallery specializing in ‘exotic’ religious sculptures.  The novel’s dyspeptic and displaced immigrant protagonist is Ike (pronounced EE-kay, not, as his customers insist, Eekay, which means ‘buttocks’ in Igbo), whose job driving a NYC cab barely keeps bill collectors at bay and reminds him constantly of his elite education’s unfulfilled promises.  He devises a scheme to return to Nigeria, steal his people’s war god, and sell it to the gallery.  The novel traces Ike’s satirical, tragicomic journey back to his homeland and the surreal culmination of his entrepreneurial plans. 

It’s a good plot, and I won’t spoil it by disclosing more details.  Instead, let me discuss some ways that Foreign Gods, Inc. is an exceptional – not just an interesting and/or entertaining – book.  In fact, if I were still teaching postcolonial or world literature, I’d definitely include it on the syllabus.  Not only is it brand new and great fun to read (and short enough that undergraduate students wouldn’t rebel); it’s also packed with important themes and excellent topics for papers and class discussion.

For instance, the book treats the immigrant/exile/transnational experience with humor and perspicacity.  As people and circumstances keep reminding Ike that he’s ‘at home’ neither in the United States nor in Nigeria, he tries harder and harder to become accepted, to lose the metonymic ‘accent’ that marks him as an outsider, even a failure, on two continents.  Not merely linguistic, his accent also inflects cultural negotiations.  He’s uncomfortable schmoozing with his taxi fares to secure larger tips, he doesn’t quite understand how his Africanness appeals to certain sorts of American women, black and white, who see him as an exotic trophy; he tries to buck the bribery protocols necessary to do much of anything in Nigeria; he tramples on the kinship and generational expectations operative in his home village.  Any productive paper ideas here, fellow educators?

Generous syncretism: a depiction of Jesus Christ in an Igbo Mbari shrine to Ala, the Earth Goddess.

Like many Nigerian peoples, the Igbo characteristically have adapted new deities, artforms, materials, and celebrations into their own cosmology and cultural practices.

Or maybe students (and you) would like to begin by exploring the concept of ‘foreign gods.’  There’s the first-level connotation – the trade in, and shallow buyer desire for, African and other ‘tribal’ artworks: a sculpture of an Igbo deity, stripped of its function and ritual efficacy, becomes a trendy First World commodity.  There’s the second-level connotation, one Ndibe treats with care and comedy:  the introduction of Christianity to Nigeria.  Counterpoised against an interpolated story of the first English missionary’s sojourn to Ike’s homeland and his cluelessly patronizing conversion efforts is the fantastic account of a contemporary evangelical ‘pastor’ who’s running an ecclesiastical variant of the Nigerian Email scam. The third-level connotation is the worship of otherness, both by Nigerians (who in the book’s backwater village, still regard Michael Jordan as a demiurge and happily substitute expensive cars and Western-style houses for the traditional, relational ways that an individual accrues honor and status) and by wealthy North Americans who ironically fetishize the ‘primitive,’ be it art or human beings.  All these levels merge on the fourth, the deification of `money and the status it appears to confer . . . and point to a fifth level, a critique of absolutist belief systems that attempt to erase gray areas from human interactions and aspirations.

Yet another way to approach Foreign Gods, Inc. is via its manipulations of language.  Ike, like most educated Nigerians, speaks ‘proper English.’  (English is one of the country’s official languages, acting somewhat like Latin did in Medieval Europe.)  But when Ike talks with Nigerian functionaries or people in his home village, he is accused of ‘blowing grammar’ – of showing off and, more devastatingly, of renouncing his natal place by pronouncing words in mimicry of colonial and neocolonial masters.  Ndibe uses Nigerian pidgin to register average people’s English.  This organic Creole contains its own history, of indigenous syntax and rhythms plus functional English vocabulary, and Ndibe employs it accurately enough to give it legitimacy but sparingly enough to avoid making pidgin-speakers sound ignorant.  His biggest problem, I think, is how to represent conversations conducted entirely in Igbo. Ndibe’s solution involves flavoring dialogue with a judicious amount of untranslated Igbo words and phrases, interjecting many translated proverbs, and approximating the leisurely, circuitous way of approaching subjects characteristic of tradition-based rural societies.

Misunderstood ‘foreign gods’: a random and supposedly demonic image featured in a contemporary ‘anti-idolatry’ missionary publication.  Probably unknown to the graphic designer, this statue shows a ruler either smoking a pipe or biting on the munkwisa root . . . both symbols of political power, spiritual authority, and wise speech that are also used to ward OFF malevolent forces.

Even Ike’s ‘blown grammar’ retains traces of perception modalities encoded in non-English ways of knowing and describing the world.  Whereas to most Westerners, the sense of sight is paramount – particularly when one encounters new landscapes, new people, or art objects – to Ike these encounters involve other senses, particularly the sense of smell. This is an added layer of linguistic complexity (and, as you’ll see, of plot complexity), as are the hilarious episodes of willful mistranslation and of idiosyncratic neologisms and creative orthographies spun by characters driven by unmoored ambition and self-aggrandizement.

Then there is satire itself:  a risky mode not often employed in emergent national literatures when social realism is called on for muscular work and magical realism is called upon to capture absurdities of politics, cultures, even languages jerked into someone else’s definition of modernity.  Satire is also hard to write about, as one needs to know enough about what is being exposed and ridiculed in order to detect satire at all . . . and one needs to be attuned to satiric clues without which a text reads as purely funny or purely angry.  And thus satire is hard to write successfully.

Foreign Gods, Inc., succeeds in its satire, I think, as it does in its examinations of diasporan identity, of idols of the marketplace (and of the television and the cell phone, of the shrine and the church), and of language itself.  Read and enjoy.  Then consider teaching it (and tell me how it went).  Enwe akwukwo!

Foreign Gods, Inc.  Okey Ndibe.  New York:  Soho, 2014.  Hardcover, paperback (forthcoming in October), electronic format.

Marking What and How We Read

Blackened Fingers and Bent Pages, or

Why I Like But Don’t Yet Love My Kindle

After a pleasant hour reading The New Yorker yesterday, I put down the magazine and noticed black ink smudging my thumbs and the inside of my right middle finger.  On the way to wash my hands, I grabbed a large, thick book I’d finished reading, intending to put it back in the study.   First, though, I had to divest it of its ‘bookmarks’ – two Harris Teeter receipts, a Duke Power bill envelope, an ancient and toothless matchbook from a New York restaurant, and a cardboard coaster. 

I do have actual bookmarks, but they’re often not around when I need them.  Hence, the use of whatever random bits of paper are within reach.  I take them out if they interfere with re-shelving but often leave the smaller ones in place, tiny time capsules of the Knausgaardian minutiae of my life.  To rediscover them months or years later is to receive small shocks of pleasant nostalgia, rather like coming across the marginal notes, underlinings, and stars scribbled in old textbooks, or the ubiquitous folded corners that, in my case, range in size from dainty turn-downs to ruthlessly large triangles depending on the importance of the mutilated page.

This is one reason I love print books and magazines.  Not only do they have material personalities of their own (their covers, their weight, their fonts, their smell); they also mark the process and circumstances of reading . . . and, in the form of ink smudges, paper cuts, and red marks left when one falls asleep on top of a hardcover, they mark the reader herself.

E-books cannot do this.  Not being quite as ancient as Mary Worth, who was a senior citizen when the comic strip debuted in 1938 so now is about 130 years old, I do have a Kindle.  And I like it a lot.  It’s superior to print books when the print is small or the bulk is big.  You can get free downloads of most classic literature, so you can be equipped when seized with an overwhelming urge to re-read Jane Austen or finally get around to neglected Dickens novels like Little Dorrit.  Most seductively, virtually instantaneous delivery means you need never be without something good to read, nor do you have to suffer deferred gratification. 

Yet I don’t love it.  Yes, Kindle does have some sort of annotation function (I’ve never used it) and the electronic equivalent of crimped page corners.  But it’s not the same as a ‘real’ book or magazine.  Accessed through an electronic reader, books lose their individuality and become disembodied narratives.  I become anxious when, having stopped reading for a couple of minutes, the device automatically goes to sleep and shows me a creepy picture of Emily Dickinson.  A Kindle doesn’t function well for art books, most magazines, or other works with lots of photos or illustrations (I suppose I could upgrade to Kindle Fire, as I have a plain-Jane model, but I don’t like a small format for reading visually rich things . . . which is also why I’ve never watched a movie or TV show on a computer, pad, tablet, or god forbid, a phone). 

Then there are the big-picture issues, like Amazon driving every other bookseller on the planet out of business, like enabling bad writers to self-publish horrible novels, like contributing to the general cyborgization of our culture, as people seem less and less able to unplug themselves from their gadgets.  On the other side of the argument, e-books neither contribute to global deforestation nor to increased domestic book clutter. 

And they have a benefit I didn’t expect:  anonymity.  When you’re sitting in a waiting room or a coffee shop occupying time with your Kindle, no one knows what you’re reading.  You are not marked as an intellectual or a plebe, a spiritual person or a sociopath.  Your choice of reading matter does not lead to unwanted conversations with nosey or obnoxious strangers.  Which, unless you’re trying to make the acquaintance of random book lovers or are an academic trying to impress your peers by lugging around the latest translation of a trendily unreadable Continental author, is a very good thing.  Maybe even a lovable one.

                                         (Point of privilege:  I do like Kafka, in any format.)