From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimar and Nazi Family Policy, 1918–1945 (review)

Mouton's book traces German family policy from the Weimar Republic through the Third Reich. As one of the few studies to bridge the 1933 divide, Mouton's work makes clear that although state attempts to manage reproduction with the goal of rejuvenating the nation began during Weimar, the Nazis made a clear break with Weimar when they commandeered family policy as an instrument for their racial agenda. But policy is not the whole story: Mouton's focus on implementation reveals that certain interactions served to dilute the Nazis' goal of a radical transformation of the family. Indeed, many women were able to "challenge, negotiate, manipulate, or, most frequently, evade Nazi policy altogether" (281).

Chapters on marriage policy, divorce, pronatalist initiatives, policy toward single mothers and their children, and adoption and foster care portray an increasingly interventionist state after 1918. Both Weimar and Nazi Germany supported marriage and encouraged women to bear more, healthier children. Weimar progressives envisioned preemptive intervention to improve family health and mitigate suffering, but conservative and religious forces thwarted it in the name of family independence. The Nazis brought their own agenda of radical intervention but in the name of "purifying the Volk" by preventing "undesirable" births and encouraging reproduction among "healthy" women, married and unmarried. Yet the Nazi state failed to raise birth rates significantly; women—whose behavior was the main object of policy—took advantage of incentives to bear children only when it was in their own interest.

Methodologically, Mouton moves seamlessly between the national level of policy and law to the vagaries of local implementation. Her use of individual stories drawn from Westphalian case files makes compelling reading. Each chapter opens with the stories of those who were the subjects of policy directives, non-Jewish Germans who negotiated the maze of measures that grew starkly more coercive after 1933 (Mouton rightly stresses the lack of options for Jewish Germans). She also portrays judges, bureaucrats, and mayors striving to implement mandates while simultaneously working to preserve their own interests. Mouton emphasizes how such mundane factors as workload, limited funding, and, later, wartime exigencies routinely diluted state goals; overtaxed doctors and social workers applied their own definitions of who was "worthy" of aid, while religious institutions attempted to shield many labeled "unworthy." Although Nazi policy aspired to be monolithic, the reality differed, though not necessarily because of conscious resistance. Many of the people involved believed in Nazi ideology and worked to implement it. Those who evaded it seemingly acted in a compartmentalized fashion compatible with selective compliance in other areas.

Mouton does not offer a radically new interpretation of German family policy, but she bolsters the case for discontinuity between the Weimar and Nazi states. Her portrait of the interplay between state directives and their actual implementation offers a compelling reminder of the limits of social engineering, making it required reading for anyone interested in the operations of daily life under various modern regimes.