Newsletter No 36 November 2003
Conference Report:
Gendering Modern German History. Rewritings of the Mainstream
21.03.2003-23.03.2003, Toronto
Co-organized
by the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies at the Munk Centre
for International Studies at the University of Toronto and the German
Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.
Report by Molly
Loberg (Princeton University) and Karen Hagemann (Technical University of Berlin)
Writing on the history of German women has - like women's history
elsewhere - undergone remarkable expansion and change since it began in the
late 1960s. Like women's history generally, the first decade of research culminated
in the publication of books with programmatic titles like "Women search
for their past". Since then, the search for a "herstory" and
the question of women's visibility has become more and more of a moot point.
Not only have the questions become more varied and complex (which women are
we searching for, which women are visible, in what way, when, where, and in
which concrete historical contexts?); there has also been, as in the case
of the historiography of other countries, an increasing emphasis on writing
the history of women as part of a broader history of gender.
Women's history still continues to flourish alongside gender history
but the focus of research has increasingly shifted from women to gender.
This shift of emphasis acknowledges the assertion that gender is not
only a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences
between the sexes, but also a primary way of signifying relationships of power.
Moreover, gender is of crucial importance for the creation of meaning in social
and political life. Far from referring only to men and women, gender constructions
are used to give meaning to many other fields of the economy, society, and
politics, and even everyday life. And here, too, they constitute relations
of asymmetry and hierarchy. This understanding of gender has made it possible
to make men and masculinity objects of historical research. Research in the
field of women and gender in modern German history has followed these general
trends of development from women's to gender history. The number of articles
and books by women's and gender historians with a focus on 19th- and 20th-century
Germany
is still increasing. The best of these studies are among the most innovative
in their field of German history. They
have pushed forward the move from traditional political history to social
history. They helped to develop social history and broaden its focus. Many
of them took the "linguistic turn" seriously. The results of this
research have certainly changed our knowledge of German history, but to what
extent? Did they also change 'mainstream' historiography on Germany
- as early women's and gender historians hoped? How developed are the differences
between North America
and Germany
in this respect?
This were the main questions that stood in the center of the German-North-American
Colloquium "Gendering Modern German History: Rewritings of the Mainstream (19th-20th Centuries)"
that Karen Hagemann, DAAD-Visiting Professor for German and European Studies
at the Munk Centre for International Studies in the academic year 2002/03,
and Christine v. Oertzen, research fellow at the German Historical Institute,
Washington, D.C. (GHI), organized in Toronto on March 21-23, 2003. The conference
was co-organized by the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies at
the Munk Centre for International Studies, University
of Toronto,
and the GHI, and amply supported the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
The conveners invited 31 experts from Germany
and North-America to perform "a critical stocktaking" of the field.
Altogether nearly a hundred scholars from Germany,
Canada,
and the US
participated in the conference.
In her introduction, Karen Hagemann discussed the development of
women and gender studies in the field of German history and compared the state
of the field in Germany
and the United States. She emphasized
that by and large the development of women's and gender history in Germany
followed the general trends of the field, but that national differences still
remain and not only in the way in which "Gender/Geschlecht" is defined.
The mere fact that the German term "Geschlecht" means both sex and
gender is important for conceptualizing and writing about the field.
There are also differences in the way in which German scholars do gender
history. These differences are the result, on the one hand, of a distinct
historiographical tradition, and on the other of the generally more hierarchical
and conservative structures of German academia. In order to gain access to
this system, the themes of gender studies tend more frequently to follow the
trends of the so-called 'mainstream' research, while at the same time approaching
research in a different way. This explains for example why interest in a theme
such as the military, war and masculinity was relatively strong early on in
Germany. What is more, despite many frustrating experiences,
some gender historians continue to cherish the vision of reciprocity and integration
between gender history and economic, social and political history. Thus, they
do not wish to write only for the community of feminist scholars, but seek
instead to develop a dialogue. As part of this dialogue, they try to challenge
the 'mainstream' by questioning its theories and methods, periodization, focus,
value systems, priorities and hierarchies. Feminist critique continues to
focus on the widely shared concept of the "universal" and the "particular"
in history, since what the so-called "mainstream" defines as universal
or particular is nothing else but a decision about relevance. Decisions about
what is relevant measure the so-called universal in history by the male yardstick
of the decision makers who dominate politics, the military and the economy,
and the mental universe of the opinion makers who shape scholarship and the
media, while at the same time constructing anything that deviates from it
as a "special case" even if it affects the overwhelming majority
of a society. Hagemann's assessment was skeptical. She stressed that she cannot
see at the moment that this challenge has met with much success.
Despite the development of women's history into gender history the
prevailing opinion still seems to be that gender history is 'merely' or primarily
women's history, in a dual sense: history studied by and referring to women.
This notion is the basis of the academic policy of 'additive integration',
which has largely dominated until now - a policy that makes it possible to
continue to ignore the importance of 'gender'.
Everything related to 'women' and 'gender' is still constructed as
a 'special' interest and delegated to women's and gender studies. In North
America, especially the USA,
the situation appears to be much better, on the one hand because the proportion
of women in tenured professorships is significantly higher and on the other
because women's and gender studies enjoy a greater degree of acceptance, although
there are substantial variations from university to university.
During the conference, the connections between different structures
of the academic systems and different approaches and trends in the development
of women's and gender history were one important topic of discussion. Especially
German participants emphasized the importance of the different structures
for the possibilities and limits of the research. They underscored moreover
that the differences in the historiographical tradition also nowadays form
the research interests and methods even in the field of gender history. A
second point of intense discussion was the actual relationship between women's
and gender history on the one side, and gender history and the history of
men and masculinities on the other. Some North-American scholars questioned
the increasing interest of German gender historians in masculinity studies.
They wondered if this is only a strategy of assimilation and integration into
the still very powerful German 'mainstream'. Others disagreed and defined
the history of men and masculinities as one of the most innovative fields
of gender studies that pushed forward to a rewriting of history in general,
because it analyzes the making of asymmetries, power structures and hierarchies.
A third subject of ongoing discussion during the conference was the question
what we mean if we speak about the 'mainstream' and whether we should use
this term. The majority agreed not only that it is more difficult than ever
to define this term, because of the increasing plurality of historiographical
approaches, but also that it is problematic to use the term: if we use it,
we reproduce the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion that are an inherent
part of this term by defining ourselves as 'marginal', as 'outsiders' of the
'mainstream'. Therefore, the major questions of the conference
were: What are the goals with which we conduct gender history in the field
of German history? What consequences do different goals have for our history-writing?
How we can get - especially in Germany
- more influence on the field in general, if we aim for a 'mainstreaming'
of gender history? These questions run more or less through all conference
papers and comments.
In the first paper "Nation, National Identities and Collective
Memories," Geoff Eley (University
of Michigan,
Ann Arbor)
discussed how gender might be used to rewrite perhaps the most familiar narrative
of German history: nationalism. The Enlightenment and French Revolution provided
the modern political vocabularies of "nation" and "citizen,"
but also assumed binary gender distinctions. At its "constitution-making"
moment (1860s-1870s), Germany,
like many other countries, drew upon vocabularies that posited inclusions
and exclusions, equalities and hierarchies. But the engendered terms of German
citizenship, according to Eley, must also be historicized and understood within
the unique circumstances of the struggle for unification and the Kulturkampf,
when aggressive boundary drawing by German liberals between backward Catholicism
and the progressive middle-class bourgeois family set long-lasting definitions
of national belonging, and shaped the terms of women's political agency throughout
the Wilhelmine period. Further study of the discourses at Germany's
multiple "constitution-making moments," Eley concluded, might reveal
the possibilities and limitations of making new claims to citizenship at moments
of historical rupture. His paper made a strong case that gendered discourses
of the nation were shaped and reshaped during key historical moments.
Karen Hagmann discussed another traditional field of historiography
in her presentation: "The Military and War." She stated that German
military history belonged to the fields of historiography that have confronted
the challenge of women's and gender history for a long time at best only on
the margins. The obvious 'maleness' of the subject was perceived as quasi-'natural'
given, which thus did not need to be addressed. In her paper, she discussed
which concept of gender might be especially fruitful for an analysis of the
military and war, and which dimensions of the military and war are influenced
by gender. She pursued the question of whether, and to what extent, the new
"military history in extension" also encompasses gender history,
and how far gender studies have succeeded in rewriting the so-called 'mainstream'.
At the end she provided a brief overview of the state of research on the military,
war and gender, and suggested some of the main deficits of this research.
She proposed that because of the close interrelationship between civilian
and military society, home and the front, both should be analyzed more strongly
in their contexts. Moreover, the obsolete periodizations should be abandoned and different
periods should be compared far more than usual. Last but not least more regional
and national comparative studies and transnational research is necessary.
Thomas Kühnes (University
of Bielefeld)
paper entitled "The State, Parties, and Politics" focussed on politics
as the decision-making process of the state (i.e. national parliaments, parties,
elections, governments, law), from which women in Germany
have been traditionally excluded. "Bringing the State back in" that
could be - he suggested - the program of historiography which would utilize
the challenge of gender studies for the analysis of state actions and institutions.
New cultural histories of politics have made significant contributions to
this approach by challenging the notion of the "autonomy" and "objectivity"
of the state. But gender has to be integrated as well. He stressed that here,
as in other field of gender history, gender is only
one of many important categories of difference for a broader inquiry into
asymmetries and power relations in state related politics. This is especially
true if one wants to analyze the nature of political networks, rituals, symbols
and rhetoric. Kühne concluded that scholars who want to grasp asymmetries
and hierarchies not only have to study the interrelationship between different
categories of difference but also widen gender history and include the history
of men and masculinities.
In the fourth panel, Belinda Davis (Rutgers
University)
presented a paper on "Protest and Social Movements". She outlined
some of the problems and paradoxes revealed by research on women's political
activism, for example: the trade-offs women face in seeking equal status within,
working outside, or trying to modify structures created by men; women's loss
of status within protest movements after these groups gain political power;
conservative women politicians' tendency to achieve greater influence despite
or because of their advocacy of more traditional women's roles; the fragmentation
of women's movements as organizing exposes differences among women (class,
racial, religious, sexual orientation). Davis
asked participants to consider what such findings suggest both for the desired
direction for future activism as well as further scholarly inquiry. Edith Saurer (University
of Vienna)
reviewed in her presentation areas of gender research that have been productive
for the study of "Religion and Religious/Ethnic Differences." These
included: the denominational women's movement (Jewish, Catholic and Protestant),
the "feminization" of religion in the 18th/19th centuries, and the
ambivalences of attaining greater influence within structures dominated by
men. She concluded that, in an age of globalization, comparative work becomes
all the more important, especially on the topics of conversion (e.g. from
Judaism to Protestantism in the 19th century), intermarriage, and religious
plurality.
In the sixth panel, Maria B. Baader (University
of Toronto)
presented a paper on "Jew and other Germans" in which she considered
the relationship between multiple historiographical margins and mainstreams.
Jewish history was originally a reflexive enterprise by which Jews
explored their relationship to God and the community. Beginning in the 1970s,
however, Jewish history transcended the margins as non-Jewish scholars and
readers demonstrated greater interest, especially in the Shoah. Baader evaluated
as a relative success the incorporation of gender into mainstream scholarship
within the larger framework of German-Jewish history. Gender played a pioneering
role in German-Jewish social history (especially of the middle-class) and
it was social (rather than intellectual or religious) history that made the
greatest inroads into established narratives. Baader suggested the Jewish
working class and representations of masculinity and nation as areas for further
study.
Although scholarship on gender formations under the Nazi regime has
surged, many of these works remain within the established "perpetrator,
victim, bystander" paradigm and few have made it into the "big picture"
histories, Doris Bergen (University of Notre Dame) commented in her presentation
"The Construction of Race and the Holocaust." Bergen
explained how gender research might advance our understanding not only of
relationships between men and women in this period, but also the basic mechanisms
of power hierarchies. She described how the courts' ascription of certain
racial/ethnic classifications (e.g. Volksdeutschen) depended on gendered criteria:
fitness for duty (male), reproductive capacities and household skills (female).
Complicating "race" and "blood," formerly considered fixed
in the Nazi worldview, suggests one example of how gender research may reshape
such an established field. Kathleen Canning (University
of Michigan,
Ann Arbor)
charted in her paper divergent trajectories for the categories "Class,
Citizenship and the Welfare State" within different national historiographies.
As an example, the Anglo-American focus on class as a set of meanings and
experiences left more room for the study of women than a more structuralist
German approach, Canning contended. Gender studies and the linguistic turn
fostered new paradigms for understanding class, just as mainstream German
scholarship moved on to other social formations and, thus, neglected important
contributions by German and non-German historians. Canning considers the "unmooring"
of structural categories an interdisciplinary innovation and expressed concern
that "mainstreaming" gender history might close off future exchanges
by concentrating too much on disciplinary aspirations.
Merith Niehuss's (University of the Bundeswehr, Munich)
presentation on "Families, Household and Consumption" offered suggestions
regarding how historians might greater utilize research in other disciplines.
She considered statistics a source not fully exploited by historians, particularly
for work on the 20th century. The fields of psychology and sociology, she
suggested, could further help historians to interpret decisions made about
employment, family size and household management. Niehuss advocated greater comparative work on
women's lives across different periods and regimes (GDR versus FRG), as well
as the lives of children and youths.
With changing notions of sexuality during the 1960s-1970s as serving
as the background and impetus, early inquiries into "Bodies, Sexuality
and Reproduction" focused on breaks and continuities of the Weimar
and Nazi period, Attina Grossman (The Cooper Union, New York) recounted. The
inquiries revealed striking counterintuitive: in contrast to more progressive
imagery, Weimar
institutions experimented with sexual regulation schemes and population control
and, despite their reactionary reputation, National Socialists encouraged
certain radical forms of "Aryan" heterosexuality. Subsequent work
continues to concentrate on the regulation of sexuality, often as a way of
exploring sexuality on the social margins, rather than the everyday practices,
experiences and attitudes of historical subjects (e.g. the New Woman). Despite
the methodological challenges, Grossman asserted that it might be time to
give these areas greater attention.
In the last panel entitled "From the Margins to the Mainstream?
A German-North America Comparison," Jane Caplan (Bryn
Mawr College,
Philadelphia)
and Hanna Schissler (University
of Hannover)
offered concluding comments on the conference presentations and discussion.
They focused not only on points that had been raised several times in the
discussions but also on deficits that should be discussed further. One was
the question what exactly is meant in different academic contexts by "gender"
and how does the status of this concept compare in German and North American
scholarship. Caplan referred in her answer to this question to Joan Scott's
conclusions that scholarship has approached gender in two ways (1) as binary
male/female differences and (2), as sets of masculine/feminine subject-positions
(i.e. not fixed social or biological categories). She cautioned that the predominance
of the first methodological camp has obscured the issue of multiple sexualities,
both in papers presented at the conference and the field in general. Another
question both commented on was the problem of the margin/mainstream model.
They demanded that this model should not only be discussed more critically
but also should be contextualized. It might better describe the position of
"gender" in Germany,
where such scholarship has faced greater institutional barriers. To state
this does in no way imply that research by German scholars lags behind North
American historiography. Rather, it acknowledges the distinct professional
cultures in which historians work.
A publication on the topic of this conference is under preparation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Molly J. Loberg, Princeton
University,
Department of History
mloberg@Princeton.EDU
Karen Hagemann, Technical
University
of Berlin,
Center for Interdisciplinary Studies on Women and Gender
hagemann@kgw.tu-berlin.de
