continuing to read Kater's Hitler Youth ...

[truepenny]

Professor Kater has put forward an extraordinary proposition:

Girls did not possess the same degree of herd instinct that characterized the males, which motivated them to join groups, gang up on others, and eventually made them complicit in crimes such as assault and murder. Girls had constituted only one-third of the total membership in the Weimar youth movement, which suggests a greater tendency to maintain their individuality rather than submerging it in a mass group.
(72)

While I certainly would like to believe that, by virtue of having two X chromosomes, I can count on my inherent rugged individualism to protect me against being enthralled by fascist demagoguery and mob rule, I can think of several other things that that information about female involvement in the Weimar youth movement might plausibly suggest, none of them a grossly overgeneralizing piece of sexual essentialism.

Harrumph.

Comments

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Ye-es... Like oh, perhaps, just perhaps, the ideology of church, children and the kitchen meant that young women stayed at home!

[txanne.livejournal.com]

That was my first thought, too.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

On women in the Third Reich, I remember being distinctly impressed by Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics, though it's ages since I read it and there may well be more recent work on this question.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Again, thank you!

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

That should read "Girls were not ALLOWED to join groups" etc etc.

Are there any good studies of the Bund Deutsche Mädel in English, do you know?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I have not found one yet, and, yes, I have been looking. (Most of what Kater seems to be doing is an English-language synthesis of primary and secondary sources on the HJ and the BDM in German--which, since I can't read German and am very interested in the topic, is reason enough to keep going through the o.O .)

[libskrat]

Given the sexual predation that seems to have been a part of things... "not wanting to be raped" possibly plays a role here?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, not all of the Weimar youth groups were spiritual predecessors of the HJ (Kater is grossly overgeneralizing in more than one direction here).

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

Girls did not possess the same degree of herd instinct that characterized the males

Really?

The whole clique thing was invented in the 1960s. Clearly.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

That seems unlikely, given the amount of herd instinct many of us experienced -- on either or both sides -- in junior high.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That was my thought, pretty much exactly.

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

*throws copy of Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine at Prof. Kater*

*would offer you a copy in a much more orderly manner if I had one--it's very, very good*

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I wonder if there's information from letters and diaries by the girls who joined or didn't join Hitler Youth. For that matter, if parental permission was required, whether there's first hand information from the parents.

It's conceivable that girls are less fond of paramilitary trappings than boys, and would rather self-organize to do bullying. However, this is the merest guesswork.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I have it on good personal authority that at least some girls who joined the female version of the Hitler Youth did so because it meant you got to camp out, swim, sail, canoe etc.

[raisedbymoogles.livejournal.com]

...yeah, she must have never met my female classmates in junior high. -_-

[fitzcamel.livejournal.com]

It's also funny that Kater juxtaposes "girls" and "males," rather than using a parallel construction.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm reminded of the 1960s novel Wildcat Under Glass by Aliki Zei. It's a semi-autobiographical account of a young girl witnessing the changes wrought by the fascist dictatorship which came to power in Greece in the mid-1930s. The protagonist's older sister joins the Greek fascists' equivalent of the Nazi youth movement, at least partly for the thrill of the fancy uniforms, and definitely for the thrill of being in the "in" group.

-H. Wolf

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I remember reading that! That brings back memories. Thank you, H. Wolf, you've made my day! :-) Yes, I too remember that the sister wanted to join the youth group to wear a fancy uniform and be special. Also if I remember correctly, both girls were heavily pressured to join, and having joined, the sister couldn't leave -- or maybe some plot happened and she did, but my impression was that this was highly unusual.

(Personal note: I read that book as a child in the 1980s and I think that may well have been the first time I encountered the idea that Greece had a fascist dictatorship between the wars (1936-40). Of course, I was very young at the time, but I think that period of history may have been eclipsed in popular memory almost completely by the very traumatic later events -- the war, the occupation, the civil war, and the dictatorship of '67.)

Anyway, if anyone is interested, I see that various lists (e.g. the ALA Batchelder award winners page etc.) have the author's name written in English as "Aliki Zei" but that is not correct & will result in very few google hits. Her name is "Alki" -- Αλκη in Greek -- not Alice. Website at http://www.alkizei.com/ (incompletely translated, I'm afraid).

Relevant to your interests, she also wrote a very realistic ya book about the German occupation of Greece, which I think traumatized me a little as a child and possibly kick-started my interest in the Second World War. The title in English translation is "Petros' War".

Kate