Marxism, gender and mediated memories of National Socialism : the paradoxical case of Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (1976)

This article explores ambivalences in the representation of women's participation in the Third Reich in Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (1976). Its thematic and aesthetic departure from the GDR's official stance towards National Socialism is well-noted. As this article demonstrates, however, Wolf's subversive feminine and moral perspective on the Nazi past also relies on an ideal of human interaction, embodied in some of the female protagonists. This leads Wolf to reinstate the idealised gender norms that traditionally define the memory of National Socialism. Her association of women with essential values further clashes with institutional Marxism's emphasis on the historical, and therefore changeable, nature of man, his social relations, and of gendered oppression. This article considers Wolf's paradoxical departure from and reinscription of the state-sanctioned model of history in light of the Marxist texts that have shaped Wolf's interpretation of fascism, paying particular attention to the place of the Frankfurt School's concept of instrumental reason and J.J. Bachofen's notion of matriarchy in her feminist and historical understanding. An examination of the ambivalent construction of gender and guilt in Kindheitsmuster raises important questions about how gender functions symbolically in the left-wing texts that came to shape post-war interpretations of National Socialism in both Germanies