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Gender, Sexuality, and Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Elizabeth Heineman
Affiliation:
University of Iowa

Extract

In the years leading to the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, popular books and films have sparked lively discussions about the ways Germans use gender and sexuality to interpret the Nazi past. July 2003 saw the re-release of Eine Frau in Berlin, the anonymous diary of a woman who experienced the mass rapes surrounding the Battle for Berlin. In October of that year, the film Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) told a sentimental tale of a late-returning POW's relationship with his son. Coming on the heels of renewed discussions of German suffering, the popular film and best-selling diary formed something of a “his-and-hers” opportunity to revisit debates about guilt and trauma, Nazi-era dominance and postwar degradation, now with gender front and center. If these debates raised concerns that Germans might believe their sufferings have redeemed their guilt, Thor Kunkel's novel Endstufe raised a different specter: a Nazi guilt that is not redeemed, that is paired not with suffering but rather with pleasure. Endstufe, released in March 2004, describes scientists at the SS Hygiene Institute who, in their cocaine-filled leisure hours, produce and enjoy pornographic films.

Type
Articles Germans as Victims During the Second World War
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2005

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References

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5. Two additional recent popular films deserve consideration, although I was not able to view them in time to include them in this essay. Margareta von Trotta's Rosenstraße concerns non-Jewish women's successful protest to have their Jewish husbands released from captivity and possible deportation. Bernd Eichinger and Oliver Hirschbiegel's Der Untergang invites the audience to view tensions among the male Nazi leadership in the Reich's final days through the eyes of Hitler's young and naive personal secretary, Traudl Junge.

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65. Heineman, , “The Hour of the Woman,” 354–95. Because the Americans and British waged the bombing war, the GDR could draw on this history of “victimization” even more easily than the FRG could.Google Scholar

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