Conservative Empowerment and the Gender of Nazism: Paradigms of Power and Complicity in German Women's History

The historians' debate of the 1980s about the Holocaust was a major event in West German cultural history. Academic historians became public intellectuals who debated questions of German citizens' guilt for the Holocaust. After the heated exchange subsided, a new, but far less public, debate about women and Nazism broke out between German women's historian Gisela Bock and American historian of German women Claudia Koonz. Were women victims or perpetrators of the Holocaust? Did German feminists resist or accommodate the Nazis? In addressing Bock and Koonz's answers to these questions, this essay challenges U.S. women's historians to rethink the political consequences of "women's culture." The author employs the distinction between cultural feminism and gender theory to differentiate the approaches of Bock and Koonz. Of primary importance is understanding how these perspectives have produced incompatible readings of history. Finally, the article augments gender theory with the Foucauldian premise that power is never merely repressive, in order to investigate patriarchy as a form of women's empowerment.