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.]