Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics - Hardcover

Koonz, Claudia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312549334 ISBN 13: 9780312549336

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1987

Synopsis

National Book Award Nominee
American Library Association Notable Book
An Outstanding Book in Women's History at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians

From the collapse of the Kaiser's regime to the destruction of Hitler in his bunker, Germany has been studied, explicated, and psychoanalyzed time and again. Yet there have been few detailed investigations into the historical and cultural roles played by German women in modern times. This important book, which Kirkus called "original and intriguing," corrects this imbalance.

About this title

About the Author:

Claudia Koonz is a professor of history at Duke University.

Review:

"Ms. Koonz digs deeply and discerningly into a variety of documents, some of them previously untapped to record the mixed results of Nazi efforts at mobilizing within various secular, Protestant and Catholic women's groups . . . she has written a book of great historical and moral importance. It invites further probing of an extremely difficult issue—that of gender responses to situations of potential and actual evil. Ms. Koonz's work makes clear that the unsparing insights required, feminist or otherwise, are likely to be both painful and paradoxical."—Robert Jay Lifton, The New York Times Book Review

"About the Nazi movement in Germany, one always feels that something essential has been left unsaid, a missing link that would account further, and deeper, for Hitler and the death camps. This vital link is German women. In the Third Reich, women were to men as the iceberg is to its tip, and no history of the fascist period can be complete that dismisses—as most have—women's crucial role. Claudia Koonz has written an astonishing, definitive book, indispensable to Holocaust studies and Feminist studies."—Terrence Des Pres, Professor of English, Colgate University and author of The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps

"Mothers in the Fatherland is an important book which illuminates a dark and painful aspect of women's past with clarity, sound scholarship, and insightful interpretation. Indispensable for students of European history, it is equally recommended for those working in American, Social, and Women's history."—Gerda Lerner, Robinson-Edwards Professor of History and WARF Senior Distinguished Research Professor, University of Wisconsin, and author of The Creation of Patriarchy

"The American historian Claudia Koonz, in Mothers in the Fatherland, makes many powerful and original revelations . . . [she] is the first to examine in detail, often by using previously unexplored archives, the role of women in the Nazi state."—Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0312549334
• ISBN 13: 9780312549336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 556