A FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION of memory studies is the ideathat collective remembrance is a highly mediatedversion of “history-in-motion,” which “remak[es] theresidue of past decades into material withcontemporary resonance.” The recent graffitiing ofSeward Johnson's sculpture Unconditional Surrender offers apertinent example of this process of recasting.Modeled on the iconic photograph by German-Jewishemigre Alfred Eisenstaedt, the statue depicts USNavy sailor George Mendonsa passionately embracing apliant nurse on September 2, 1945. This image wasinitially celebrated as a visual encapsulation ofthe joy of VJ Day; in 2005, however, anAustrian-Jewish refugee named Greta Zimmer Friedmanidentified herself as the photographed woman andrevealed that the kiss had not been consensual. Thisdisclosure cast the title of Johnson's work in a newlight, exposing the extent to which women's sexualpassivity and the fine line between consent andcoercion are naturalized—if not romanticized anderoticized in Western cultures. It took #MeToo todisturb the narrative. When Mendonsa's death inFebruary 2019 was widely reported in obituaries, aprotestor sprayed the Sarasota statue with the words“#MeToo.” This graffito embodied the work's alteredstatus as feminist cipher for “the normalization ofassault.” Conversely, the fact that localauthorities categorized the #MeToo tag as vandalismand removed it suggests the difficult entanglementof sexual politics and history with nationalidentity.

Several scholars have considered the memorial dynamicsat the heart of #MeToo. For instance, Laura Moisianalyzes the “temporal engagement” integral to thepublic sharing of stories, which she calls a form of“navigating the past with the tools (words,concepts, ideas) of the present.”5 This chaptercontributes to such discussions by specificallyexamining how #MeToo has the potential to shift ourunderstanding of history. First, I elucidate therelevance of the past to debates and scholarshipunder the sign of #MeToo and discuss the extent towhich historicization has been used to downplay thesystemic dimensions of rape culture in the present.Part 2 of this chapter explains the implications ofsuch historical thinking for how Germany remembersits history of sexual violence, especially in thecontext of World War II.

Recently many activists, scholars, and political commentators have focused their attention on rising income inequality, stagnating wages, union decline, and the disappearance of steady work. They have proposed a variety of programs to address these trends, such as expanding eligibility for overtime, implementing paid family leave, raising the minimum wage, and investing in more training. While each of these specific proposals are valuable in themselves, they address only a part of the problem and offer only partial solutions. What they miss is that that there has been a fundamental change in the nature of work over the past three decades. Since the late 1980s, the entire context of the work experience has changed profoundly. Gone are the days when individuals (at least white, male individuals) with only a high school education could obtain a steady well-paying job by their late twenties and expect to stay in that job for the remainder of their careers. In the past, many blue-collar jobs provided job security, income stability, and a reliable package of social insurance and retirement benefits. But the steady job with a single employer throughout one’s career is a relic of the past.

MITTEILUNG AN DEN ADEL by Elisabeth Plessen clearly spoke to the emotional needs of a generation, selling over one hundred thousand copies within four years of its publication. The semiautobiographical novel is an early example of the West German literary mode that critics dubbed Väterliteratur (father literature), a label that captures the androcentrism of contemporary antifascist discourse. Fathers are central to this strand of autobiographical or autofictional literature, written by members of the first postwar generation who attempt to understand how their fathers could have come to support National Socialism, how the war shaped them, and how these experiences combined were transferred to the next generation through an impersonal and disciplinarian upbringing. As in Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina and Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, the family is depicted as the locus of authoritarian mentalities.

It is unsurprising that authors of Väterliteratur drew connections between the punitive family milieu and the Nazi past, given their political backgrounds: many were sympathetic to the 1968 protest movement. In fact, Plessen was a member of the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS, Socialist German Student Union), the dominant branch of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO, Extraparliamentary Opposition), when she was a student in West Berlin. The specific tenor of the student protests in Germany owed to the students’ anger about perceived continuities between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic. In Germany, the issues that united global reform movements (capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and war) appeared to signal a restoration of the defining elements of National Socialism. The Third Reich was frequently brandished as a symbolic weapon in the confrontation between the conservative establishment and the student reformers. As the protests grew increasingly explosive, and segued into the terrorism of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF, Red Army Faction), critics drew parallels between the tactics of the students and the violent methods used by the National Socialists. In the eyes of the students, by contrast, the older generation was the Nazi generation. It needed to answer for its moral and political failings during the Third Reich.

The student movement directed its political energies toward overcoming authoritarian character structures and hierarchies across the social spectrum, from state institutions and the media to the bourgeois family. A conception of authoritarianism that bridged the private and the political was popularized, in particular, by Rudi Dutschke, the ringleader of the antiauthoritarian strand of the SDS.

“WIR KENNEN DIE FLEISSIGE TRÜMMERFRAU und die von Rotarmisten vergewaltigte Frau. Wir kennen die Opferfrau. Die Täterfrau kennen wir kaum” (We know all about the woman of the rubble and the woman raped by a Red Army soldier. We know the woman as victim. We barely know the woman as perpetrator). This sentiment was repeated frequently in newspaper reviews of Wendy Lower's Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013; Hitlers Helferinnen: Deutsche Frauen im Holocaust, 2014), a historical study seeking to challenge the stereotypes about women's moral innocence and political passivity that I examine in this book. Using material that has become accessible to Western scholars since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lower unfolds the biographies of thirteen German women who became witnesses, accomplices, or perpetrators of genocide in the Nazi East. Lower's gripping narrative style succeeded in opening up this history to a nonacademic audience. Hitler's Furies was a bestseller in the United States in 2013, a finalist for the National Book Foundation Award for Nonfiction, and extensively reviewed in Anglo-American and German newspapers.

These feats are remarkable for a study of women and National Socialism. Claudia Koonz's study Mothers in the Fatherland (1986) was admittedly nominated for a Book Award in 1987 and reviewed in English- Language publications such as The Guardian and the New York Times. In Germany, however, it garnered little attention in the media. Even the so-called Historikerinnenstreit (female historians’ dispute) between Koonz and Gisela Bock in 1992 caused “barely a ripple” on the surface of mainstream cultural memory. While the male historian's dispute between scholars such as Jürgen Habermas, Ernst Nolte, and Andreas Hillgruber unfolded in major newspapers, the debate between Bock and Koonz played out in an academic journal. Until Lower's book, no academic study of women and National Socialism received more than sporadic media coverage in Germany, unlike widely discussed studies of male perpetrators such as Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (1992), Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), or the Verbrechen der Wehrmacht (Crimes of the Wehrmacht) exhibition that originally ran from 1995 until 2001. As Christine Richard speculated in her review of Lower's book, “mag sein, dass die massgeblichen Medienmänner nur ungern am edlen Frauenbild kratzen” (it may well be that the leading men of the media are reluctant to chip away at the noble image of woman).

IN 2005, NIKLAS FRANK PUBLISHED a vitriolic act of narrative reckoning, Meine deutsche Mutter (My German Mother, 2005). Using family letters and diaries, he reconstructed the life of his mother, Brigitte Frank, the wife of Hitler's governor-general in Nazi-occupied Poland. The author excoriates his mother for her heartlessness, opportunism, and utter disinterest in the political iniquity that facilitated her lavish lifestyle. In the epilogue to his book, Frank broadens his gaze, venting his bile at an entire generation of German women:

Frank impugns the images of women that populate the cultural memory of the Second World War. If women are not remembered primarily as victims of war, he asserts, they are imagined as post hoc redeemers of the nation, as the Trümmerfrauen (rubble women) who helped to rebuild Germany brick-by-brick. This book explores why women's complicity in the Third Reich struggled to capture the cultural imagination in the same way. Until the rise of social history in the 1960s, historical accounts of Nazism and its roots focused on men and totalitarian structures. The new approach to historiography shifted attention away from the traditional subjects of historical research (foreign and military policy) to everyday life in the Third Reich. At this time, National Socialism was broadly understood as “the ultimate in male chauvinism”—in ideology if not in practice.

INGEBORG BACHMANN's Malina is a classic text of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming-to-terms with the past). The bestselling novel relates one woman's anxious struggle to survive in a world that suppresses all knowledge of violence past and present. The history of National Socialism suffuses the novel as a nightmare not yet over. In her dreams, the narrator is tormented by a brutal father figure whose Nazi appurtenances signal the political and historical dimensions of her suffering. In one of her most quoted statements, Bachmann explains that the dreams reveal the interpersonal origins of fascism. In her view, “der Faschismus ist das erste in der Beziehung zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau” (fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman). It would be hard to find a more fitting quotation to open the first section of this book, which examines assumptions about the links between masculinity, patriarchy, and fascism that became entrenched in the 1960s.

As part of the nominal Todesarten (Ways of Dying) cycle on which the Austrian author worked from 1962 until her death in 1973, the genesis of Malina ran parallel to events such as the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–65) and the student protests in 1968 that brought previously suppressed questions of historical continuity and individual guilt to the forefront of the public consciousness. Elke Schlinsog has shown that the Todesarten-project entered a new phase when Bachmann moved to Berlin in April 1963 to take up a scholarship from the American Ford Foundation. The author's time in Berlin refined and radicalized her perception of postwar society's failure to confront openly the horror and legacy of war. Since the publication of Sigrid Weigel's intellectual biography, Hinterlassenschaften unter Wahrung des Briefgeheimnisses (Legacies under the Protection of the Secrecy of Correspondence, 1999), critics have especially emphasized the significance of Bachmann's contact with members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory for her understanding of society. In his influential lecture “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” (“What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?,” 1959), Theodor Adorno famously warned, “dass der Faschismus nachlebt; dass die vielzitierte Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit bis heute nicht gelang und zu ihrem Zerrbild, dem leeren und kalten Vergessen, ausartete” (that fascism survives; that the oft-cited process of working through the past has not occurred yet and has degenerated into its caricature, empty and cold oblivion).

KINDHEITSMUSTER REPRESENTS A MILESTONE in the memory politics of both Germanies. Pioneering historian Claudia Koonz commends the novel as one of the first works, literary or otherwise, “which challenged canonical accounts of the Third Reich as a ‘man's world.’” Implicating her female protagonists in the ideological and moral corruption of the Third Reich, Christa Wolf subverted the model of history sanctioned by the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party), which upheld the definition of fascism adduced at the seventh congress of the Communist International in 1935 and viewed National Socialism as an expression of “der reaktionärsten, am meisten chauvinistischen, am meisten imperialistischen Elemente des Finanzkapitals” (the most reactionary, most chauvinist, most imperialist elements of finance capital). This focus on politico-economic structures overshadowed questions of individual responsibility. Accordingly, the few GDR histories of women in the Third Reich centered not on their complicity but on the regime's misogynist policies. The preeminent historian Jürgen Kuczynski set the tone, declaring that the discrimination and degradation of women “erreichte unter kapitalistischen Bedingungen ihren Höhepunkt in den Jahren der faschistischen Monopoldiktatur” (reached its peak under capitalist conditions during the years of the fascist dictatorship). In Kindheitsmuster, Christa Wolf complicates this view, showing how the Third Reich provided welcome opportunities for female advancement.

Wolf's intention to challenge the state-sanctioned version of history sounds in the incipit of Kindheitsmuster: “Das Vergangene ist nicht tot. Es ist nicht einmal vergangen” (The past is not dead. It is not even past). This translated quotation from William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (1951) had previously been cited by Wolfgang Joho in Das Klassentreffen (The School Reunion, 1968) as a means to assert the continuity between the Third Reich and West German society. By contrast, in an interview with Hans Kaufmann, Wolf explains that it is erroneous to purport that fascism was effaced “nachdem man seine Machtzentren und Organisationsformen zerschlagen hatte” (after its centers of power and structures of organization had been destroyed). Rather than depicting National Socialism as bygone history, the narrative of Kindheitsmuster shifts associatively between the Third Reich and the global upheaval of the 1970s.

INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, women continued to be marginalized in family and cultural memory about National Socialism. As historian Margit Reiter observed in a series of interviews with the second postwar generation, the majority still construe the Third Reich as the past of their fathers and grandfathers; “die Mütter werden hingegen marginalisiert oder sie bleiben sogar gänzlich ausgeklammert” (mothers, by contrast, are marginalized or they are completely disregarded). The family stories that do feature women tend to focus on their fortitude and suffering during the war rather than on their political agency or complicity. At first glance, contemporary novels that revisit the Nazi past from a female perspective unfold along similar lines. They frequently foreground the hardships endured by women during the Second World War and the occupation era. For example, novels including Larissa Boehning's Lichte Stoffe (Light Materials, 2007), Kathrin Gerlof's Alle Zeit (All the Time, 2009), and Annette Pehnt's Chronik der Nähe (Chronicle of Closeness, 2012) depict women's struggles to bring their family through the war and the chaos of its aftermath. Others turn in more detail to women's experience of flight, expulsion, and wartime rape, notably Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), Reinhard Jirgl's Die Unvollendeten (The Incomplete, 2003), and Tanja Dückers's Himmelskörper.

The ubiquity of fictional and nonfiction reassessments of the past in 2003 alone caused journalist Ulrich Raulff to christen it the year “in dem 1945 zurückkehrte…. Ein Jahr, das man zu kennen glaubte, und das auf einmal in neuem Licht dasteht” (in which 1945 returned…. A year that we thought we knew and that has suddenly appeared in a new light). The sheer number of writers to reassess the Nazi past at such a historically insignificant moment, without an obvious public prompt, betokens the inadequacy of official memory narratives (molded around anniversaries) that decree what is to be remembered, when, and how. Raulff suspects that rhetorical rituals of Vergangenheitsbewältigung sidestep the issues that touch the emotional core of individual and communicative memory. If the recent eruption of memory narratives can be considered a “return of the repressed,” then, we are talking about repressed emotions as well as forgotten topics. The idea of a “historical uncanny” has been more explicitly invoked by literary scholars in the past decade.

THE UNIFYING CONCERN of the preceding section of this book, the tendency to blame social and historical ills on men, is the target of Gisela Elsner's satire in the essay “Vom Flausch und Fluch der neuen Frau” (On the Fleece and Curse of the New Woman, 1988). In her typically trenchant diction, Elsner reports that “ein Steckbrief kursiert, auf dem statt einer Verbrechervisage ein Hodensack zu sehen ist” (a wanted poster is in circulation that shows not the face of a criminal but a scrotum). In this essay, she ponders the apparent consensus among the left liberal intelligentsia that men (bar a few anomalies) have contributed nothing to the world but its destruction. Elsner was not alone in her skepticism about the roots of this misandry. In the 1980s, the philosophers Frigga Haug and Christina Thürmer-Rohr caused controversy among West German feminists when they suggested that patriarchal structures would only erode when women became aware of their own complicity and investment in oppressive thought patterns, not least the ideology of separate male and female spheres. Thürmer-Rohr insisted that women too readily painted themselves as post hoc “Trümmerfrauen des Patriarchats” (rubble women of patriarchy), disclaiming responsibility for social affliction because they were not directly responsible for the economic or political decisions that had caused social and environmental harm. Women become “Mittäterinnen” (co-perpetrators), she argues, because they tolerate the destruction wrought by male-run institutions. As the term “Mittäterinnen” implies, however, Thürmer-Rohr primarily conceives the political failings of women in the context of an already guilty male society. Perhaps the most wellknown example of this widespread tendency in feminist circles is Margarete Mitscherlich's essay “Antisemitismus: eine Männerkrankheit?” Mitscherlich argues that female antisemitism stems from identification with male prejudice. She concludes that expressions of antisemitism among women do not contradict the long-standing psychoanalytical belief that interaction is central to the psychic world of women who therefore develop a morality, “die liebevoller, beweglicher und humaner ist als die des Mannes” (which is more loving, flexible, and human than men's).

Gisela Elsner reproaches such conceptions of femininity, which she particularly associates with the current discourse of “Neue Mütterlichkeit” (New Motherliness) that emphasizes the social value of qualities deemed maternal.