Claudia Koonz | |
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| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Wisconsin–Madison Columbia University Rutgers University |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History |
| Institutions | Duke University |
Claudia Ann Koonz is an American historian ofNazi Germany. Koonz's critique of therole of women during the Nazi era, from afeminist perspective, has become a subject of much debate and research in itself.[1][2] She is a recipient of thePEN New England Award, and aNational Book Award finalist.[3][4] Koonz has appeared on the podcastsHolocaust, hosted by University of California Television,[5] andReal Dictators, hosted byPaul McGann.[6] In the months before the2020 United States presidential election, Koonz wrote about the risks ofautocracy in the United States forHistory News Network[7][8] and theNew School'sPublic Seminar.[9]
Koonz received a BA in 1962 from theUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison that included two semesters studying at theUniversity of Munich. After a year of traveling overland through Asia,[10] she studied atColumbia University, from which she earned an MA in 1964, before earning aPhD fromRutgers University in 1969.[11]
Claudia Koonz is Peabody Family Professor emerita in the History Department atDuke University. Before coming to Duke in 1988, she taught atCollege of the Holy Cross inWorcester, Massachusetts,[10] and atLong 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 andThe Nazi Conscience, which analyze the sources of ordinary Germans' support for the Nazi Party duringWeimar and Nazi Germany.[10]The Nazi Conscience has been translated intoSpanish,Japanese, andRussian.[13] Her current book on stereotypes in French media (forthcoming withDuke University Press) isBetween Foreign and French: Prominent French Women from Muslim Backgrounds in the Media Spotlight, 1989-2020.[13]
Koonz is best known for documenting the appeal ofNazism 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 theNew York Times wrote thatMothers 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 theThird 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, likeGertrud 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 likeIlse Koch. Koonz includes women who were opposed to Nazism 100% as well as "single issue" critics (of, for example,sterilization andeuthanasia) but did not protect or protest the deportation of Jews todeath camps. Koonz's views have often been pitted against those ofGisela Bock in a battle some have referred to as theHistorikerinnenstreit (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 theHolocaust, 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 theNew 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 ofMothers 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 womendid own black slaves of both sexes, and in Nazi Germany, as Claudia Koonz showed us in her heartbreaking book,Mothers in the Fatherland, Nazi womendid brutalize and kill Jews of both sexes. And colonizers both lorded and ladied it over the colonized of both sexes.”[22]
Conventional scholarship defines Nazism by its anti-Semitism, anti-modernism, and anti-liberalism, as expressed in publications likeDer Stürmer, butThe Nazi Conscience examines the “positive” values of community and ethnic purity that attracted ordinary Germans, including millions who had never voted Nazi beforeAdolf 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 forThe Review of Politics calledThe 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 ofThe 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]
Prior to the 2020 United States presidential election, Koonz published articles in History News Network and the New School'sPublic Seminar warning about the risks of autocracy in the United States.[7][8][9] Following the election ofJoe Biden in 2020, Koonz's work analyzed the presidency ofDonald Trump through the lens of World War II history,[30] and analyzed thewithdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan in 2021 through a historical lens.[31]
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