Recommended Reading on Women in the Third Reich

[Haven]

Hitler's Heroines: Stardom & Womanhood in Nazi Cinema
Antje Ascheid
Temple University Press
2003

"Hitler's Heroines is the first in-depth study of the complex role of female stars in Nazi cinema. Ascheid's detailed analysis of three of the most celebrated stars—Kristina Söderbaum, Zarah Leander, and Lilian Harvey—shows the crucial role female stars played within Joseph Goebbels's entertainment industry. Ascheid highlights womanhood as a central area of contestation within German fascism and her work is informed by a wealth of recent critical studies on the history and cinema of the Third Reich."
—Gerd Gemünden, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College

German film-goers flocked to see musicals and melodramas during the Nazi era. Although the Nazis seemed to require that every aspect of ordinary life advance the fascist project, even the most popular films depicted characters and desires that deviated from the politically correct ideal. Probing into the contradictory images of womanhood that surfaced in these films, Antje Ascheid shows how Nazi heroines negotiated the gender conflicts that confronted contemporary women.

The careers of Kristina Soderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander speak to the Nazis' need to address and contain the "woman question," to redirect female subjectivity and desires to self sacrifice for the common good (i.e., national socialism). Hollywood's new women and glamorous dames were out; the German wife and mother were in. The roles and star personas assigned to these actresses, though intended to entertain the public in a politically conformist way, point to the difficulty of yoking popular culture to ideology.

The introduction & chapter 1: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/chapters ... 04_ch1.pdf

Google Book: https://books.google.com/books?id=rF6uu ... es&f=false

Sadly, I only have this sample on PDF. -- Haven

[IlonaG]

I've read that Helmuth. An excellent but harrowing account by one female resident before, during and after the fall of Berlin. I highly recommend it too. Not for the feint hearted though - here is a link to a review of the book with details: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/his ... 31,00.html

This is a great book and it helped me understand where my cousins came from and why they all had different & Russian fathers, and why they were all born just weeks apart.

[Mary Jane]

Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower



That's a must read... Not only it helps us in understanding the Holocaust in a most enlightened way, its very subject is the role of women in it.

"Wendy Lower’s stunning account of the role of German women on the World War II Nazi eastern front powerfully revises history, proving that we have ignored the reality of women’s participation in the Holocaust, including as brutal killers. The long-held picture of German women holding down the home front during the war, as loyal wives and cheerleaders for the Führer, pales in comparison to Lower’s incisive case for the massive complicity, and worse, of the 500,000 young German women she places, for the first time, directly in the killing fields of the expanding Reich."

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Furies-Ge ... 0547863381

[djpool]

My hope is this book will become a must read for those interested in females serving in the Wehrmacht. Its supposed to be available at the end of May. I did the final proof/edit in plenty of time to meet the timeline.

9780764350467.jpg

[Maehler]

Here you can look a little fashion in war time

http://www.bochumer-bunker.de/mode_1944.html

[MatMask]

Very interesting book on the subject: author: Vasilchenko "Fashion and Fascism"

[karimovic]

I totally concur with your proposal of Missie Vassiltchikov's book!

In a similar vein are Ruth Andreas-Friedrich's journals: Berlin Underground: 1938-45 and Battleground Berlin: Diaries, 1945-48. She was a columnist and individual from a neighborhood Resistance gathering, and her perceptions on wartime and after war Berlin are interesting.
thanks
Lucky Patcher 9Apps VidMate

[elizabeth f.]

The Gift Horse, Hildegard Knef
Hour of the Woman, Christian von Krockow (someone on this forum told me about it many years ago)
More Was Lost, Eleanor Perenyi
Nothing for Tears, Lali Horstmann
Milena, Margarete Buber-Neumann

[Hikari]

Well, there seem to be many German books that I can't read at all ...
Is there any research on female workers and female military services in Germany?

[tigre]

Hello to all ; I've found this.........................

Knitting, Baking and Mothering for the Fatherland.

An Excerpt here: https://www.grin.com/document/294913

Cheers. Raúl M .

[uhu]

now available in the U.S. "My Soldier Days". Don't miss this one. Written by her daughter with her help and with her wartime diary. Gabi Matzen is conscripted in October 1943, and after short basic training close to her Bavarian home town posted to northern Germany. There she becomes one of the ‘Flakwaffenhelferinnen’ , an anti-aircraft auxiliary, moved around from training camps to a variety of stations and gun batteries. Her duties involve laying and repairing telephone cables, working ack-ack searchlights, and later laying artificial smokescreens across Germany’s rivers in the industrial north.After the total chaos of the end there is only one way for her to get back home: she has to do it on foot. After a 700km walk through a devastated, partly enemy occupied country she returns to her Bavarian homeland..Gabrielle Horrobin. Unpublished photos she took during that period with camera she almost has 'liberated' at war's end.