Nancy R. Reagin. Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 247 S. $82.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-84113-9.
Reviewed by Bertram Troeger (University of Jena)
Published on H-Nationalism (January, 2008)
Germania's Domestic Qualities
The Niederwalddenkmal, one of the massive monuments erected in Germany after 1871 to glorify the nation, was inaugurated near Ruedesheim am Rhein in 1883. Considering that it was intended to commemorate German victories during the Franco-Prussian War and to ensure the foundation of the Kaiserreich, it would have been appropriate if the mastermind of these developments, Otto von Bismarck, had taken part in the ceremony. Yet Bismarck was absent. He did not like the monument. In particular, he frowned on the depiction of Germania on its top and apparently was uneasy with the militant appearance of the statue. In his view, "'there is something unnatural about a female statue with a sword, taking such an aggressive posture,'" and he was convinced that "'any officer will feel like I do on this matter.'"[1]
For Bismarck and his officers, femininity was not a suitable public representation of the German nation in the late nineteenth century. For these elite male figures, German nationalism, with its militarism, underlying bellicosity, and public rituals, appears to have been a masculine affair. Yet, Nancy R. Reagin sets out to demonstrate that German nationalism had a second, more feminine, side that is visible when looking beyond the public sphere. Tracing the national implications of broom (not blood) and iron between 1870 and 1945, she argues that German nationalism extended beyond patriarchal public symbols and rituals into the private feminine sphere of home, kitchen, parlor, and cabinet.
Reagin's first chapter gives an overview of the norms of domesticity that developed in nineteenth-century Germany. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus (Language and Symbolic Power [1991]) as a theoretical background, the author shows how certain idealized norms of household management acquired rather broad acceptance. Propagated in advice literature and journals like the Deutsche Hausfrauen-Zeitung, promoted in domestic science courses, and enforced through "peer pressure," despite their urban and bourgeois origins, these standards were highly successful in crossing confessional, regional, and (albeit to a lesser degree) social boundaries (p. 19). By the end of the century, German housewives formed what Benedict Anderson calls an "imagined community," (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism [1983]) and the image of the ideal housewife was well in place. She managed the house with thrift and kept up exceedingly high standards of cleanliness and order; she was particularly hardworking on Saturdays, waxing the floor and baking a cake to be consumed on Sunday afternoon; and she made sure that German Christmas met the norms of domesticity for which it had become famous.
Having painted a detailed image of the German Hausfrau, Reagin goes on to explore how this approach to domesticity "became a commonplace vehicle for the articulation of national identity" (p. 54). Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German commentators on the performance of housewives in different countries tended to use a range of national cliches. In particular, they contrasted foreign shortcomings, such as the alleged tendency of English women to leave most of the work to their servants or the special interest of French females in the latest fashion, with the propensity of German Hausfrauen to work particularly hard to keep the house as spick and span as possible. The contribution of domestic ideals to the formation of German national identity becomes even more palpable when Reagin shifts her focus toward the colonial context. Her analysis of publications dealing with the role of German women in Africa indicates that these female colonists and their ideals of domesticity were considered crucial in rendering the colonies as German as possible. In fact, in some cases, German women were regarded as representing the stronger sex, keeping up German standards of housekeeping against all odds and saving men from assimilating too much.
Given that extreme thriftiness was one of the qualities that many writers ascribed to German housewives, it is not surprising that the state made use of domestic concepts in times of emergency. After 1914, when Germany came under the special strain of a naval blockade and a war on two fronts, housewives were increasingly "mobilized on behalf of the nation" (p. 73). In this context, housewives' organizations were the main influence on housekeeping and consumer habits. The activities of these rather conservative associations included collecting raw materials for the benefit of the nation and organizing courses in mending and cooking with ersatz products. Such policy was initially dictated by the necessities of the war, yet the ideals behind it were not dropped after 1918. It is true that the housewives' leagues were inclined to support the (largely American) ideas of household rationalization, which became current in the 1920s, but they also pleaded for economic nationalism and tried to discourage the consumption of foreign products, in favor of German Quark, apples, potatoes, herring, and rye bread. During the early 1930s, these associations moved further toward the political right and began endorsing a racial approach to defining the nation. Under these circumstances, it was easy for the Nazi state to absorb them after 1933.
As Reagin's fourth chapter shows, the role of the housewife and many of the principles of household management that originated among the Wilhelmine bourgeois strata and that were promoted by the Weimar era housewives' leagues were not only hijacked by the Nazi rulers, but also racialized, ideologized, and enforced to an unprecedented degree. The author introduces a whole range of measures and initiatives that can serve to illustrate this policy. For example, bourgeois notions of housekeeping, cleanliness, and order formed crucial categories for awarding women who had given birth to four or more children with the so-called Mother Cross, or for interning "asocial" families in Hashude, a domestic reeducation camp in Bremen. A mix of Nazi ideology, economic nationalism, and an older concept of domesticity was also at the heart of Mothers' Schools, offered throughout the country and visited by millions of German women. Even Christmas, the most private and domestic German holiday, was utilized to demand support for the racial Volksgemeinschaft.
The utilization of the German domestic sphere for the aims of the regime reached a new apogee after the Nazi Four-Year Plan was announced in 1936. Prioritizing national militarization and working toward autarky, the regime had to confront German households with severe limitations. In the long run, the policy of cushioning these deprivations by providing or promising certain selected consumer goods could not hide the fact that "it was in the household ... that ordinary Germans first felt the pinch of the Nazi Four-Year Plan" (p. 150). In view of this, a broad range of propagandistic measures was launched, with the appeal to well-established domestic ideals at its center. For instance, to free resources for rearmament, Nazi women's organizations tried to persuade consumers to show their laudable thrift by buying sturdy furniture instead of giving in to frequent changes of style. Similar to the activities of the housewives' leagues of the First World War, they also promoted the use of ersatz products, offered cooking courses centered on certain products, or admonished housewives to recycle, discouraging any kind of waste. In contrast to the standards of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century housewife, however, the main economic beneficiary of these efforts was not to be one's own family. Rather, the overall aim of the regime was to suppress consumer demand to free resources for militarization. Reagin reveals that these endeavors were not always successful. For example, no measure of propaganda could persuade consumers that synthetics, which were touted to push German autarky, were better than natural fabrics.
Reagin's last chapter is bound to disperse any remaining doubts about the political importance of the German concept of domesticity. She shows that domestic standards played at least an auxiliary role when potential Volksdeutsche from many parts of Eastern Europe were screened for relocation to occupied western Poland after 1939; indeed, "life-style could override even a favorable initial 'racial' classification" (p. 196). Then, Reagin explores the experiences and self-perceptions of German women from a wide range of Nazi organizations who acted as almost domestic missionaries to carry out "'Germanization' campaigns" among Volksdeutschen in occupied Poland (p. 183). Without doubt, integrating supposedly ethnic German women and their families into the German Volksgemeinschaft was to a great degree seen as a matter of domestic reeducation. The cliche that German households in Eastern Europe had always formed islands of order and cleanliness was well established before Poland was occupied in 1939. In line with this stereotype, occupation authorities and their female helpers from the Reich tended to regard any deviation from this ideal as the result of foreign influences that had to be eliminated in favor of good German housekeeping.
A short conclusion, in which Reagin recapitulates her main points, rounds out an excellent work that breaks new ground in the study of German nationalism. In particular, it challenges preconceptions of nationalism as a phenomenon that takes place mainly in the public sphere. As the author rightly underlines (and as illustrated by Bismarck's remark on the Germania of the Niederwalddenkmal), the young German national state was actually rather insecure about its public symbols--much in contrast to "domestic practices and norms" that "were seen as stable and unchanging, and also as essentially German." Thus, these practices and norms came to provide "an integral part of the repertoire of identities available to Germans" (p. 220). Yet, at the same time, Reagin's innovative approach of correlating nationalism and the domestic sphere also confirms well-established findings. In particular, her work gives another proof that nationalism becomes best recognizable when focused on encounters with those who stood outside the national community. Reagin's study is most convincing when she deals with German women in Africa and with the conversion of Volksdeutschen to German standards of domesticity in occupied Poland. Outside the borders of the Reich, prevalent preconceptions about lifestyle and domesticity became particularly explicit as national characteristics.
All these findings are offered in a well-structured narrative that is written in a highly accessible style. The work is certainly not shallow and academics will surely make up its primary readership, but Reagin also deftly manages to weave into her text background information that is necessary to understand her analyses, and she never fails to pepper her points with graphic examples. As a result, even the general reader will find this book a pleasant read.
New questions could be raised at the borders of the time span of Reagin's study. Firstly, the author hints at confessional influences as one of the reasons behind the genesis of domestic standards. It would be rewarding to have a closer look at this link, especially against the background of recent discussions on the revived relevance of denominational boundaries in nineteenth-century Germany.[2] Secondly, I am not sure whether Reagin is correct when she assumes, in a concluding remark, that "a life-style that would have embodied the essence of Germanness to one generation now seems old-fashioned and even (to people on the left) unattractive" (p. 223). Admittedly, the very concept of the Hausfrau is not particularly popular with leftist Germans, but it seems to me that environmental issues and the question of how to live a sustainable life have caused a revival of a whole range of the domestic ideals that Reagin describes.
Of course, these matters lie outside Reagin's main focus and may be left to further studies. As far as the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich are concerned, Sweeping the German Nation is a deeply researched and carefully argued book that makes a very important contribution to the ongoing research on German national identity. It is to be hoped that its emphasis on the domestic sphere as an important facet of nationalism will attract broad attention.
Notes
[1]. Quoted in Eduard von Lade, Erinnerungen aus meinem vielbewegten Leben (Wiesbaden: Schellenberg, 1901), 2:78 (translation by reviewer).
[2]. See, especially, Olaf Blaschke, ed., Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970: ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002).
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Citation:
Bertram Troeger. Review of Reagin, Nancy R., Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870-1945.
H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14025
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