'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

perpetrators are defined predominantly as male and their victims are depicted as an
undifferentiated „race.‟ Koonz claims:
Women‟s history during the Third Reich lacks the extravagant insanity of Hitler‟s
megalomania; it is often ordinary. But there, at the grassroots of daily life, in a
social world populated by women, we begin to discover how war and genocide
happened by asking who made it happen. (xxxv)
In her film, Deutschland, bleiche Mutter, Helma Sanders-Brahms blurs the
dividing line between women‟s gendered experience of war and what has been
designated as the collective memory of the German wartime experience. Her endeavour
was an important pioneering effort since women‟s experience of war and National
Socialism were only starting to be recognized as worthy of documentation and study
during the 1980s. 27 As McCormick explains, “The relevance of Sanders-Brahms‟ project
to feminism is evident in its presentation of an aspect of history of the Second World War
that was often neglected: a woman‟s experience” (Politics 187). Sanders-Brahms‟
examination of the effects of war on women in the private sphere offers a perspective that
has been missing in traditional accounts of history. By addressing her mother‟s
experiences, Sanders-Brahms brings to public attention a history that is often neglected,
that of non-Jewish German women‟s experience of the “Third Reich,” the Second World
War, and the Economic Miracle. With regard to women‟s gendered experience of this
period, the director takes part in what Adrienne Rich terms as a process of “re-vision –
the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new
critical direction” (35). Rich calls for women to tell their stories in order to open “master
27 One of the earlist works in German in the post-war period on women‟s roles in National Socialism was
Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch: Zur Geschichte der Frauen in der Weimarer Republik und im
Nationalsozialismus (1981) edited by the Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung. Some of the earliest
research on the topic published in English includes Jill Stephenson‟s works Women in Nazi Society (1975)
and The Organization of Nazi Women (1981) and Leila Rupp‟s Mobilizing Women for War: German and
American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (1978).
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