Zwischen Abwehr und Anpassung: Strategien der Realitatsverarbeitung in den Texten nichtfaschistischer junger Autorinnen von 1930-1945 (review)

Lydia Marhoff's book examines the texts of nine young, female authors published during the Third Reich. It seeks a place within a tradition of scholarship that has judged the literary products of 1930s Germany in many different ways over the six decades since D-Day. In the years immediately following World War II, discussions of pre-war literature were more or less taboo. 1945 was regarded as "Stunde Null" (12) or "zero hour," a designation which reflected the new, de-Nazified state's desire to focus on the future and move away from the awful mistakes of the past. Authors who had survived the war avoided mention of their earlier work. This only began to change during the sixties, when research into the literature produced by those in exile, and work on both fascist and anti-fascist texts of the 1930s, "discovered" that many of the authors of the post-war period had also published before 1945.

Much recent work on the fascist period has concluded that the national socialist state presented no immediate threat to those authors who were ethnically acceptable according to Nazi ideology, and who were neither openly homosexual nor connected with the leftwing political parties. The publication of non-political texts was tolerated as long as their young authors stayed largely within the party's ideological parameters. Marhoff's nine authors—Christa Anita Brück, Elfriede Brünung, Hertha von Gebhardt, Ilse Langner, Paula Ludwig, Ilse Molzahn, Dinah Nelken, Ilse Reicke and Oda Schaefer—were selected because they were neither members of the Nazi party or any of its affiliates, nor overtly resistant to it, and all fell broadly within the sphere of tolerance.

Marhoff's analysis covers short stories, poems, journalism, novels and drama (and Paula Ludwig's "dream texts," which fall outside the usual literary classifications). She considers them in the context of two important political ideologies. Firstly, the texts' roots are in the women's rights' movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which resulted in female suffrage, greater sexual freedom, and access to training and employment opportunities that had not been available to women in the Weimar Republic during imperial times. Secondly, they were produced in the context of national socialist ideology, which promoted marriage and motherhood as ideals for all women. Yet the Nazi ideal of freeing women from the burden of economic activity, and returning them to the sacred space of the home, was more theory than practice: Marhoff follows Gisela Bock, who has argued that the twentieth-century processes of social and political emancipation continued during the Third Reich for socially acceptable, bourgeois women (13). These nine authors are all, therefore, working with contradictory views of femininity, which have their roots in the decades before the ascent of Hitler, but which take on an alarming new aspect in the repressive atmosphere of the Third Reich.

After a first chapter which considers texts published before 1933 in order to delineate a "norm," Marhoff structures her book around the identification of two main effects, which, she claims, can be seen to a greater or lesser extent in the works of all nine authors during the 1930s. The second chapter considers Ausweichstrategie, or evasion strategy, where an author's preferred genre and subject matter can be seen to alter in accordance with the demands of the changing political climate. The third chapter examines the more challenging Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus, or setting oneself in conflict with national socialism, where the changes in genre and subject matter are motivated by the desire to make a covert critique of the Nazi party's ideals and goals.

The chapters are broken down further by genre, and by the nature of the response to fascist censorship. The evasion strategies Marhoff describes include a change in subject matter, in which authors who had previously represented a bohemian or avant-garde lifestyle—or...