Jump to content

Claudia Koonz

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Claudia Koonz
NationalityAmerican
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison
Columbia University
Rutgers University
Academic work
DisciplineHistory
InstitutionsDuke University

Claudia Ann Koonz is an American historian of Nazi Germany. Koonz's critique of the role of women during the Nazi era, from a feminist perspective, has become a subject of much debate and research in itself.[1][2] She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award, and a National Book Award finalist.[3][4] Koonz has appeared on the podcasts Holocaust, hosted by University of California Television,[5] and Real Dictators, hosted by Paul McGann.[6] In the months before the 2020 United States presidential election, Koonz wrote about the risks of autocracy in the United States for History News Network[7][8] and the New School's Public Seminar.[9]

Education

[edit]

Koonz received a BA in 1962 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison that included two semesters studying at the University of Munich. After a year of traveling overland through Asia,[10] she studied at Columbia University, from which she earned an MA in 1964, before earning a PhD from Rutgers University in 1969.[11]

Scholarship

[edit]

Claudia Koonz is Peabody Family Professor emerita in the History Department at Duke University. Before coming to Duke in 1988, she taught at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts,[10] and at Long Island University, Southampton from 1969 to 1971.

Together with Renate Bridenthal, she edited the first anthology of European women’s history, Becoming Visible.[12] She subsequently published two books, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics and The Nazi Conscience, which analyze the sources of ordinary Germans' support for the Nazi Party during Weimar and Nazi Germany.[10] The Nazi Conscience has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Russian.[13] Her current book on stereotypes in French media (forthcoming with Duke University Press) is Between Foreign and French: Prominent French Women from Muslim Backgrounds in the Media Spotlight, 1989-2020.[13]

Mothers in the Fatherland

[edit]

Koonz is best known for documenting the appeal of Nazism to German women and understanding their enthusiasm for the Nazis. Koonz has established that the leaders of German feminist, civic, and religious groups acquiesced to Nazification (Gleichschaltung) that coerced Germans into following Nazi policy. Women in Marxist movements joined with men in operating underground opposition networks. Koonz has noted that female supporters of the Nazis accepted the Nazi division of the sexes into a public sphere for men and a private sphere for women. A reviewer in the New York Times wrote that Mothers in the Fatherland explored the “paradox that the very women who were so protective of their children, so warm, nurturing and giving to their families, could at the same time display extraordinary cruelty.”[14] Koonz has claimed that women involved in resistance activities were more likely to escape notice owing to the "masculine" values of the Third Reich.[15] A mother, for example, could smuggle illegal leaflets through a checkpoint in a pram without arousing suspicion.

Koonz is also known for her claim that two kinds of women asserted themselves in the Third Reich: those, like Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, who gained power over women under their supervision in exchange for subservience to the men who wielded power over them (the authoritarian trade off) and the women who violated the norms of civilized society, such as camp guards like Ilse Koch. Koonz includes women who were opposed to Nazism 100% as well as "single issue" critics (of, for example, sterilization and euthanasia) but did not protect or protest the deportation of Jews to death camps. Koonz's views have often been pitted against those of Gisela Bock in a battle some have referred to as the Historikerinnenstreit (quarrel among historians of women).[2][16][17][18]

Mothers in the Fatherland integrates archival research into an exploration of “the nature of feminist commitment, complicity in the Holocaust, and the meaning of Germany’s past.”[19][20] The Nazis promised “emancipation from emancipation,” an appeal that resonated with Germans who feared that male-female equality meant “social and family disintegration.” But Koonz highlights the paradoxes produced by the Third Reich’s dependence on women’s participation (as subordinates, to be sure) in child-bearing, social work, education, surveillance, health care, and compliance with race policy. A reviewer in the New York Times wrote that Koonz dug “deeply and discerningly into a variety of documents,... to record the mixed results of Nazi efforts at mobilizing women’s groups, secular, Protestant and Catholic” and Jewish women’s efforts to fight against confiscation, ostracism, deportation and murder.[21]

Catherine Stimpson called the contradictory message of Mothers of the Fatherland “painful” because:

“If many societies deprive women of power over themselves, women still have power to exercise. Women, though Other to men, have their Others too. In the United States white women did own black slaves of both sexes, and in Nazi Germany, as Claudia Koonz showed us in her heartbreaking book, Mothers in the Fatherland, Nazi women did brutalize and kill Jews of both sexes. And colonizers both lorded and ladied it over the colonized of both sexes.”[22]

The Nazi Conscience

[edit]

Conventional scholarship defines Nazism by its anti-Semitism, anti-modernism, and anti-liberalism, as expressed in publications like Der Stürmer, but The Nazi Conscience examines the “positive” values of community and ethnic purity that attracted ordinary Germans, including millions who had never voted Nazi before Adolf Hitler's takeover.

A reviewer wrote that Koonz’s book challenges us to “suspend temporarily our understanding of Nazism and to try to understand the movement as the Nazis themselves understood it. In doing so, we can better understand how murderous racist doctrines infiltrated the moral and psychological fabric of the German people so easily.”[23]

A reviewer for The Review of Politics called The Nazi Conscience a “meticulously researched and engrossingly written book”.[24] Another reviewer called it a "tour de force" that documents the formation of a consensus that evolved during the “normal” years of the Third Reich, 1933-1941.[25] This was a time when National Socialist racial policy congealed, or according to Koonz, “metastasized” in three contexts: Hitler’s public persona, academic think tanks, and bureaucratic networks.[26]

During these years, the rabidly anti-Semitic Nazi base was held in check by Hitler himself and the proponents of a “rational” assault against Jews. Although ordinary Germans deplored violence, anti-Semitic measures that appeared “legal” were scarcely noticed.[27] After all, fewer than one percent of all Germans were Jewish, and by 1939 half of them had emigrated. Besides, Hitler’s government ended unemployment, scored diplomatic victories, and revived national pride. Most citizens “accepted a new Nazi-specific morality that was steeped in the language of ethnic superiority, love of fatherland, and community values," according to another review of The Nazi Conscience.[28]

Koonz cautioned that nostalgia for imagined glory is a potent force that could rally aggrieved citizens to ethnic nationalism elsewhere. “In examining how National Socialism mobilized diverse but quotidian institutional contexts to create a ‘community of moral obligation,’ she invites us to reflect on . . . the ways contemporary society demonizes, ostracizes, and excludes certain classes of people."[24] Corey Robin noted Koonz “might have cited Thomas Jefferson who, anticipating the Nazis by more than a century, saw no future for freed blacks other than deportation or extermination.”[29]

Recent work

[edit]

Prior to the 2020 United States presidential election, Koonz published articles in History News Network and the New School's Public Seminar warning about the risks of autocracy in the United States.[7][8][9] Following the election of Joe Biden in 2020, Koonz's work analyzed the presidency of Donald Trump through the lens of World War II history,[30] and analyzed the withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan in 2021 through a historical lens.[31]

Awards and honors

[edit]

Work

[edit]
  • co-edited with Renate Bridenthal Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 1977, revised edition 1987.
  • Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics, 1986[38]
  • The Nazi Conscience Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-674-01172-4.

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Guba Jr., David A. (2010). "Women in Nazi Germany: Victims, Perpetrators, and the Abandonment of a Paradigm". CONCEPT [online]. Retrieved 19 September 2012.
  2. ^ a b Grossmann, Atina (1991). "Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism". Gender & History. 3 (3): 350–358. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0424.1991.tb00137.x. ISSN 1468-0424.
  3. ^ a b "Claudia Koonz". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  4. ^ Clark, Kenneth R. (10 November 1987). "Chicagoan wins National Book Award for Fiction". The Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  5. ^ "VIDEO: Claudia Koonz - Hitler's Assault on the Golden Rule". www.uctv.tv. UCTV, University of California Television. Retrieved 8 June 2021.
  6. ^ "Real Dictators, Adolf Hitler, parts 1-4". Noiser Podcasts. Archived from the original on 2020-11-16. Retrieved 8 June 2021.
  7. ^ a b "No More Business as Usual! It's Time for Joe Biden to Defend our Democracy". History News Network. Retrieved 8 June 2021.
  8. ^ a b "Autocrats do not need a majority to destroy democracy. A divided opposition helps them". historynewsnetwork.org. Retrieved 8 June 2021.
  9. ^ a b Koonz, Claudia (29 October 2020). "The Showdown Between Democracy and Autocracy". Public Seminar. Retrieved 8 June 2021.
  10. ^ a b c "Claudia Koonz studied women in Nazi Germany. Now she hopes to save US democracy, one vote at a time". The Chronicle. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  11. ^ a b c "Claudia Koonz". American Academy. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  12. ^ Bell, Susan Groag (1 December 1979). "Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 5 (2): 348–349. doi:10.1086/493713. ISSN 0097-9740.
  13. ^ a b "Claudia Koonz – Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute". Archived from the original on 6 July 2020. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  14. ^ Collins, Glenn (2 March 1987). "Women in Nazi Germany: Paradoxes". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  15. ^ "Frigga Haug, Mothers in the Fatherland, NLR I/172, November–December 1988" (PDF). New Left Review. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  16. ^ "German Women during the Third Reich: The Evolution of the Image of the Female Perpetrator". HISTORY IN THE MAKING. 14 October 2017. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  17. ^ Bock, Gisela (1989). "Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus. Bemerkungen zu einem Buch von Claudia Koonz" [Women and National Socialism. Comments on a book by Claudia Koonz]. Geschichte und Gesellschaft (in German). 15 (4): 563–579. ISSN 0340-613X. JSTOR 40185517.
  18. ^ Koonz, Claudia; Nitzschke, Susanne (1992). "Erwiderung auf Gisela Bocks Rezension von "Mothers in the Fatherland"" [Reply to Gisela Bock's review of "Mothers in the Fatherland"]. Geschichte und Gesellschaft (in German). 18 (3): 394–399. ISSN 0340-613X. JSTOR 40185554.
  19. ^ De Grazia, Victoria (18 April 1987). "'Heartless Haven,' C. Koonz's Mothers in the Fatherland". The Nation.
  20. ^ "Articles". Victoria De Grazia. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  21. ^ Lifton, Robert Jay (3 January 1988). "Brides of the Reich". The New York Times.
  22. ^ Stimpson, Catharine R. (n.d.). "The Humanities in the Schools (ACLS Occasional Paper No. 20) – The Women's Studies Movement". American Council of Learned Societies. Retrieved 14 July 2020.
  23. ^ White, J. R. (2004). "The Nazi Conscience: Koonz, Claudia: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 368 pp., Publication Date: November 2003". History: Reviews of New Books. 32 (4): 148. doi:10.1080/03612759.2004.10527430. ISSN 0361-2759. S2CID 142898929.
  24. ^ a b Magilow, Daniel H. (2006). Koonz, Claudia (ed.). "Not an Oxymoron". The Review of Politics. 68 (4): 707–709. doi:10.1017/S0034670506330276. ISSN 0034-6705. JSTOR 20452842. S2CID 146332681.
  25. ^ Leiby, Richard A. (1 March 2006). "The Nazi Conscience, Claudia Koonz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 368 pp., cloth $29.95, pbk. $16.95". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 20 (1): 126–129. doi:10.1093/hgs/dcj011. ISSN 8756-6583.
  26. ^ Homer, F. X. J. (2005). "Review of The Nazi Conscience". The Historian. 67 (3): 569–570. ISSN 0018-2370. JSTOR 24453205.
  27. ^ Rabinbach, Anson (2005). "The Nazi Conscience. By Claudia Koonz. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2003. Pp. 362. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 0674011724". Central European History. 38 (3): 513–516. doi:10.1017/S0008938900005495. ISSN 0008-9389. S2CID 145669800.
  28. ^ Abbenhuis, Maartje (1 August 2004). "The Nazi Conscience , by Claudia Koonz The Nazi Conscience , by Claudia Koonz. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. 362 pp. $29.95 US (cloth)". Canadian Journal of History. 39 (2): 375–377. doi:10.3138/cjh.39.2.375. ISSN 0008-4107.
  29. ^ Robin, Corey (2005). "Fascism and Counterrevolution". Dissent. 52 (3): 110–115. doi:10.1353/dss.2005.0093. ISSN 1946-0910. S2CID 145254834.
  30. ^ "Comparing Trump to Hitler is a Wrongheaded Distraction". historynewsnetwork.org. Retrieved 21 September 2021.
  31. ^ Duke University Opinion and Analysis (7 September 2021). "Learning to Listen: Lessons Learned Along the Pakistan-Afghanistan Border 60 years Ago Still…". Medium. Retrieved 21 September 2021.
  32. ^ Johnson, George (4 December 1988). "Notable Paperbacks". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 8 August 2020.
  33. ^ Koonz, Claudia (15 September 1988). Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-02256-3.
  34. ^ "Claudia Koonz, 1993–1994". National Humanities Center. Retrieved 8 August 2020.
  35. ^ "ACLS Fellows (ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowships and ACLS/New York Public Library Fellowships). American Council of Learned Societies. | Scholars@Duke". scholars.duke.edu. Retrieved 8 August 2020.
  36. ^ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Claudia Koonz". Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  37. ^ "Award Winning Teachers". Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. 10 May 2013. Retrieved 8 August 2020.
  38. ^ Gordon, Linda (1987). "Review of Mothers in the Fatherland". Feminist Review. 27: 97–105. doi:10.1057/fr.1987.38.; Mason, Tim (1988). "Review of Mothers in the Fatherland". History Workshop Journal. 26: 200–202. doi:10.1093/hwj/26.1.200.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Claudia Koonz.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Claudia_Koonz&oldid=1189529647"