This article addresses the ethical quandaries of the wartime rape of German women by Russian soldiers during the last months of the war. In particular, I discuss the multiple challenges involved in reading such rapes: the danger of identifying the victimization of these women with the victimization of the German nation; the danger of trivializing or downplaying the suffering of the rape victim; the challenge of writing about rape without recycling Nazi narratives. Rape is, as Sabine Sielke maintains, “a dense transfer point for relations of power.” My readings show that, when wartime rape is made to serve an ideological agenda, as it inevitably is, the experience of the victim, her trauma and pain, threaten to disappear amidst the noise of justifications, metaphors, and political deployments. Drawing on the mythical model of Philomela, I argue that there is a legacy of violence in both silence and in writing, but there is also an ethics of reading that allows one to pay tribute to the victims’ suffering even as one negotiates and recontextualizes their stories.
When Prussia and Austria invaded France in 1792 in an attempt to defeat the revolutionary army, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) accompanied his sovereign Carl August on the campaign. Almost thirty years later, Goethe recorded his version of the defeat and catastrophic retreat of the allied forces. Goethe's account embraces the perspective of a privileged observer, who enjoys the relative comfort afforded by his social class. In contrast, the memoirs of Friedrich Christian Laukhard (1757–1822), a failed academic turned common soldier, who also participated in the campaign, are written from the vantage point of the experienced grunt. While Goethe's Campagne in Frankreich (1822) is often considered a minor accomplishment in a major oeuvre, Laukhard's Begebenheiten, Erfahrungen und Bemerkungen während des Feldzuges gegen Frankreich, which forms part of his autobiography Leben und Schicksale von ihm selbst beschrieben (1796), has received little scholarly attention.1 In spite of these different valuations, both Laukhard's and Goethe's texts have been subject to severe criticism. Laukhard's Begebenheiten has been disparaged because of its failure to turn experience into art, while Goethe's account was condemned for its failure to represent war truthfully. Clearly, Goethe's and Laukhard's texts are different in style, structure, and ideology, and yet there is one fundamental premise on which they agree. Both Goethe's Campagne in Frankreich and Laukhard's Begebenheiten, Erfahrungen und Bemerkungen während des Feldzuges gegen Frankreich are radically opposed to the concept of war as a sublime experience that many of their contemporaries endorsed and advocated. Laukhard's text offers a scathing critique of aristocratic abuse of power and deconstructs the notion of war as sublime through a focus on ‘the body in pain’ (Scarry). Goethe's text, on the other hand, which has often been accused of an uncritical stance towards the war, rejects the notion of war as a creative and ennobling force. Instead, Goethe traces war's destructive effect on the web of rules and habits that govern the peaceful working of society. Laukhardt records the horrors of war, Goethe seeks to delineate a grammar of peace amidst the terror of war.2
In both the popular imagination and much scholarly literature, the Second World War is constructed as an exclusively male endeavor. It is assumed that women were far from the front lines, relegated to the household and nursery by National Socialist policies. In truth, however, the much-touted National Socialist ideal of the housewife was a fiction that soon fell victim to the very real needs of conducting a world war. As Karen Hagemann points out, the Second World War was a total war "that mobilized both the 'front' and the 'homeland.'" 1 Before long, women not only assumed public functions that newly deployed men had left unfilled but also moved closer and closer to the front lines themselves. In doing so, they became complicit in the Nazi war and genocide.Even though the Nazi mobilization of women lagged behind that of England, the United States, and Russia, it reached proportions that were previously unheard of in German lands. 2 According to Franka Maubach, both the number of women involved in war-related work and the variety of functions women fulfilled are without historical precedent. 3 And yet, to this day, the writings of women who served in Hitler's army have received little attention, their voices drowned out by the blanket assumption that women are "marginal to the military's core identity, no matter how crucial in reality are the services they perform." 4 As I show in what follows, this omission is highly problematic: thinking about war from a different, female, perspective not only corrects androcentric views of the Second World War 5 but also offers insights into the workings of a totalitarian regime. In particular, an analysis of texts by women who served in Hitler's army helps us understand why and how women became complicit in the German war of conquest and genocide and how they account for (or fail to account for) their contribution to the Nazi reign of terror.In the following, I provide information about the status, functions, and self-perceptions of female army auxiliaries in the service of the Third Reich. In order to do so, I draw on recent scholarship and on a wide range of Women in Hitler's ArmyDespite much Nazi rhetoric about the true domestic calling of the female sex, women's lives in the Third Reich were highly militarized. Members of the League of German Girls were "drilled to march in formation and trained in field exercise and sometimes marksmanship with air rifles" 10 while adult women were recruited to perform various services for the fatherland. On February 15, 1938, Hermann Göring announced the Duty Year (Pflichtjahr) for young women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, which included farm work and domestic help and was required in order to be eligible for employment in factories or offices. 11 Similarly, as of the spring of 1934, prospective female students were required to participate in the Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst) (RAD) for a minimum of six months. 12 They too worked mostly on farms and as family helpers. Although the RAD became compulsory for all young...
Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere rür Vervielfiltigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.
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