Ordinary Women? Writing the Female Camp Guard in Fiction (an exegesis) and The Mare (a novel)

According to Nazi statistics, in 1945, approximately 10% of concentration and death camp guards were women. And yet, the Aufseherin, or female camp guard, is barely there in both Holocaust historiography and literature. This is due to their relatively low numbers, gendered readings of the Holocaust, including the post-war categorisation of all women as victims of National Socialism, as well as reluctance to examine female perpetration. This reluctance extends into fiction, which has tended to focus on Holocaust victims not perpetrators due to a long-held belief that it’s unseemly at best, unethical at worst, to depict anyone other than the victims. On the few occasions that Aufseherinnen do appear in fiction, they are usually portrayed as masculinised sadists, when, for the most part, the reality was much more banal. This thesis contains an exegesis and a creative work. The exegesis looks at the history the female camp guard and explores her representation in literature, taking into account the changing emphasis brought by the application of women’s studies onto Holocaust historiography, as well as how the concept of all women as victims of National Socialism has created a dichotomous view of female Holocaust perpetrators as either victims or sadists, when the reality was more often somewhere between. It examines the relationship between empathy and sympathy, looking at whether negative empathy has created a taboo surrounding the portrayal of the female camp guard in fiction. It argues that negative empathy is necessary in order to gain a nuanced understanding of the female camp guard and challenges the notion that understanding equals forgiveness. It also explores how The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, which is the only novel to explore a female camp guard with nuance, and The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, which is written from the first-person perspective of a Holocaust perpetrator, a perspective that does not yet exist for a female perpetrator in fiction, address these issues. The creative work is The Mare, historical fiction based on the true story of Hermine Braunsteiner, an Aufseherin who worked at Ravensbrück, Majdanek and Genthin. Written in the two first-person voices of Hermine and her American husband Russell Ryan, the novel seeks to represent a female camp guard with nuance, a feat that has not been achieved in fiction to date