From Heroic Ballads To Subversive Texts: Women Writers Of The Weimar Republic And The Third Reich

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Women writers during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich found in the weekly magazine Jugend a place where their voices could be heard. It was a magazine unique for its time, led by a male editor who was also a feminist and an ardent believer in women’s equality.

In the newly published Women Writers of the Journal Jugend from 1919-1940, Assistant Professor Kathleen Condray examines the themes found in women’s narratives during the period and the types of images female writers created for their fellow women. While many of the themes were not surprising - love, marriage, children, religion, and careers - Condray was surprised to discover that writers did not reflect the radical shift in attitudes about women that occurred from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich.

"During the Weimar Republic, women had their first chance to exercise suffrage. The period saw heated debates over abortion, birth control, sexuality, and traditional marriage. At the onset of the Third Reich, though, the emphasis shifted abruptly from the emancipated, sexually free working woman to the Nazi demand that women leave work and devote themselves to the infamous Kinder, Kirche und Küche, or children, church, and kitchen," said Condray.

Condray learned that writers during the more liberal Weimar period often depicted women as "calculating, manipulative, and cold-hearted, whereas female characters during the Third Reich show less desperation for men, are more assured, and have interests outside of courtship. Women in the workplace appear much more frequently during the Third Reich than the Weimar period; the extreme xenophobia and overt racism found in propaganda are generally not present."

In one revealing story by Johanna Birnbaum, the heroine ultimately rejects a Nazi suitor in favor of a German without party ties. A linguistic student working on her doctoral dissertation, she dumps her increasingly moody, balding and rude Nazi prince charming, making her an unlikely heroine for the time.

Love was also the number one topic in the Weimar period, with women often depicted as very cutthroat and catty as they fought over men. However, Condray found, men didn’t fare much better. Male protagonists are depicted as equally shallow and insecure. Some are decidedly misogynistic, regarding themselves as superior and treating women like children.

Jugend has been credited with helping to pioneer the development of the short story. Its editors vowed to publish any work they deemed "short and good." Well known in art circles, the journal stood in absolute contrast to one of the other major periodicals of the day, Die Gartenlaube, which relegated women writers and women’s issues to a separate section and condescendingly addressed them as "our dear female readers."

The Jugend editors who predicted that Adolf Hitler would be a brutal dictator ended up in concentration camps. Over the years, writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Hesse, and Thomas Mann were published in Jugend, which evolved into a particularly rich source of women’s writing as well, featuring authors such as Richarda Huch and Else Lasker-Schüler.

Dr. Brian Keith-Smith, compiler of An Encyclopedia of German Women Writers, notes in his review that Condray has conducted the only in-depth investigation of the literature of Jugend, in the process compiling the first comprehensive index of women writers during the period as well.

"The work in general is refreshingly independent of received views about the roles of women, and Dr. Condray points out just where the texts are of special interest, either for sociological reasons or for their effectiveness as literature," Keith-Smith writes.