American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman (review)

American Women Writers and the Nazis is an intriguing and insightful study of the intersection of writing, politics, and ethics in four American women writers whose sensibilities were shaped by what Carl Austenfeld calls "the biographical accident of being in Germany or Austria just before, during, and after the twelve years from 1933–1945" (4). Expatriates at formative periods in their writing lives, all were witness to one of history's bleakest chapters. Investigating the origins of their political consciousness, Austenfeld expands the work of critics like Shari Benstock. Positing a female expatriate generation, he shifts the arena from Paris to Germany and Austria. Within this refocused literary scene, he explores the ways in which the four writers all developed versions of the ethic of care identified by Carol Gilligan and others, effectively writing their ethical and political convictions into their subsequent work and ultimately shaping their environments through writing both fiction and nonfiction.

In its methodology and its subject, this book looks back to an earlier critical era when writers believed in the political power and efficacy of words, and in literature's pragmatic ends in the larger world. Beginning with an overview of central Europe in the 1930s and each writer's unique response to the specter of totalitarianism, the book devotes three chapters to Kay Boyle; one each to Jean Stafford, Lillian Hellman, and Katherine Anne Porter; one chapter to Porter's and Boyle's experiences of Germany; and a final chapter to such abstract questions as what constitutes an ethical reading of a text. Despite Austenfeld's obvious concerns with history and ethics, literary discussion is at the heart of his book. And indeed, he gives refreshing and astute revisionist readings of Boyle's Death of a Man, Porter's "The Leaning Tower," and Stafford's "A Winter's Tale." Informed by feminist scholarship, Austenfeld situates these women writers in a modernist U.S. context that "transcend[s] traditional limitations of gender" (6). Within the larger scope of American responses to Europe at midcentury, for example, Boyle emerges as the most Europeanized of the four writers. Unlike an expatriate like James Baldwin who, for all his time abroad, Austenfeld maintains, remains "the quintessential American" (48), Boyle writes about France with a firsthand cultural understanding even European readers acknowledged, while Hellman "represents a classic American pattern of perception" about European fascism (87). What emerges from these readings is a schematics of political awareness and involvement for each of the writers—ranging from the political naïveté of the young Stafford when confronted with fascism in Heidelberg to the sophistication of long-time European resident Boyle who immersed herself in the cultures of Austria and Germany to better critique them. But no matter where these writers belong on the ideological spectrum, Austenfeld argues, based on their European experiences, they all began to "privilege concepts other than freedom in their lives" (163), thus embodying a more holistic, engaged, duty-oriented praxis. Hellman's domestic dramas, for example, are read as enactments of larger political realities and as an espousal of "an almost romantic conception of ethics that privileged the individual agent" (86).

Austenfeld's book is lucid, persuasively argued, and blessedly jargon-free. Admittedly colored by his experiences growing up in West Germany in the 1970s, it is a fresh and original look at the expatriate scene and at four women writers whose artistic and ethical development was shaped not only by their gender but also by the unprecedented historical circumstances of mid-twentieth-century Europe.