The Holocaust and Masculinities

Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men

Björn Krondorfer, Ovidiu Creangă, Björn Krondorfer, Ovidiu Creang?, Ovidiu Creang?, Ovidiu Creang?, Ovidiu Creang?, Ovidiu Creang?, Ovidiu Creang?, Ovidiu Creang?, Ovidiu Creang?, Ovidiu Creang?, Ovidiu Creang?, Ovidiu Creang?

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438477800
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

In recent decades, scholarship has turned to the role of gender in the Holocaust, but rarely has it critically investigated the experiences of men as gendered beings. Beyond the clear observation that most perpetrators of murder were male, men were also victims, survivors, bystanders, beneficiaries, accomplices, and enablers; they negotiated roles as fathers, spouses, community leaders, prisoners, soldiers, professionals, authority figures, resistors, chroniclers, or ideologues. This volume examines men's experiences during the Holocaust. Chapters first focus on the years of genocide: Jewish victims of National Socialism, Nazi soldiers, Catholic priests enlisted in the Wehrmacht, Jewish doctors in the ghettos, men from the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, and Muselmänner in the camps. The book then moves to the postwar context: German Protestant theologians, Jewish refugees, non-Jewish Austrian men, and Jewish masculinities in the United States. The contributors articulate the male experience in the Holocaust as something obvious (the everywhere of masculinities) and yet invisible (the nowhere of masculinities), lending a new perspective on one of modernity's most infamous chapters.

PART I

GENOCIDE

Chapter 1

Hiding in Plain View

Bringing Critical Men’s Studies and
Holocaust Studies into Conversation

BJÖRN KRONDORFER

“I don’t understand: what is specifically male about these testimonies?” a colleague with a research expertise in women and the Holocaust asked when I presented two textual excerpts for Arizona teachers during an advanced Holocaust education seminar. “I just don’t see how they say anything particular about men,” she insisted. “It could very well be a general human reaction.” Her skepticism augmented the uncertainty among the attending educators who were unaccustomed to a critical reading of Holocaust testimonies through the lens of gender. Yet they were willing to explore the gendered implications in the select excerpts from a Jewish ghetto policeman and a Nazi German perpetrator.1 In our discussion we oscillated between perceiving these excerpts as just “normal” texts with no gender implications and our not so clearly articulated presumptions about men and masculinity.

The sincere and persistent questioning of my colleague, wondering aloud how these male-authored testimonies would tell us anything about men, their experiences, or their narrative strategies, led to a kind of litmus test: Could we have predicted the authors’ gender accurately in a blind review? Since the two testimonial excerpts lacked more obvious “essentially masculine” features (such as hardness, stoicism, bravery, violent behavior), what made them gender-specific? Missing ostentatious male markers, there was, perhaps, not much to discover, and attempting to analyze them through a consciously male-gendered lens would be a curiosity at best—but ultimately irrelevant. What the Jewish ghetto policeman and the German perpetrator wrote about the Holocaust—and how they wrote about it—did not seem to say much about their identities, behavior, identifications, or roles as men.

But what if it was not the absence of male markers that puzzled my colleague but our inability to recognize the omnipresence of maleness? Normative operations of maleness might be so present in the testimonies that they render their gendered character structurally invisible. If maleness is hiding in plain view, “a gendered study of men,” as Maddy Carey aptly put it, “requires more skilful gymnastics of reason” (2017, 2). How then could we find a path toward greater visibility? For the Arizona educators in this seminar, the case I made was only half-convincing, and I too began wondering whether we were chasing shadows. Were we looking for something ephemeral, thus absconding the stable ground of studying the political, ideological, and genocidal core of the Holocaust? Were we just frolicking in the shadows of the Shoah?

The image of “chasing shadows” invites another take. Could we, perhaps, compare the study of masculinities during the Holocaust to the chasing of shadows insofar as the object of inquiry disappears the moment we shine light on it? Does masculinity escape our firm grasp like a shadow that bends, grows, shrinks, and vanishes depending on the direction and source of light? Is masculinity a slippery category because we cannot get hold of it apart from contrasting it with something else? Can we advance beyond the statement that “men are what women are not”?2

This chapter is, in some ways, a response to my colleague’s skepticism about the usefulness of studying the Holocaust through a male-gendered lens. The omnipresence of a male reality might blind us to the tangible presence of “maleness” in history and its documentation—for the weight of history and historiography confirms a skeptic’s doubt about the validity of a men’s studies approach. This chapter explores what seems to be “hiding in plain view,” namely, that which we have accepted as regulative male norms, habits, practices, narratives, and interpretations.

Arguing with the Critics

The reticence I encountered among the educators is not an uncommon response. The self-set task of telescoping on men in their gendered subjectivity as our object of scholarly inquiry in the context of the Holocaust raises concerns regarding the validity of such an undertaking. At the core of these concerns is the question of what, if anything, can be learned when applying a consciously gendered approach to the historical, social, and political realities of genocide.

Is the purpose of such a venture to contribute to a better understanding of the Holocaust? In this case, a specific male-gendered lens might compartmentalize and trivialize the murderous Nazi policies that engulfed whole populations, because, so a critic might say, history has been subjected to narrow disciplinary interests. The study of genocidal antisemitism might thus fall prey to an ideological agenda. Critics of gender studies have claimed that the lens of gender distorts the historical realities that led to the full-scale annihilation of a people declared undesirable regardless of their gender—men, women, and children.3

What, however, if the purpose of this study is not so much about improving our knowledge of the Holocaust as getting a good grasp on the nature of masculinity? In this case, we might end up stereotyping male behavior by zooming in on a political and behavioral context of extreme circumstances, merely reconfirming what we already believe to be true about men: that they are prone to aggression and (sexualized) violence. Masculinity scholars might wonder if the extreme circumstances of genocide would not reduce the realities of men to facile assumptions.

Then there is the concern whether a focus on masculinity studies would remasculinize an already male-dominated field plowed by Holocaust historians, thus undermining the achievements of feminist scholarship. In this case, gender scholars might judge the blending of masculinity and Holocaust studies a politically precarious project because it would reassert, through the backdoor, a domineering male perspective.

Passionate flare-ups over the study of gender in relation to the Holocaust have, in the past, primarily focused on women and the Holocaust. An oft-quoted example regarding a general critique of gender studies is Gabriel Schoenfeld’s polemic attack against feminist Holocaust scholarship. “Between the Scylla of an academicized ‘Holocaustology’ and the Charybdis of a universalized victimology,” Schoenfeld wrote in 1998 in the neoconservative Jewish magazine Commentary, “the worst excesses of all on today’s campuses are being committed … by the voguish hybrid known as gender studies.” The magazine’s senior editor lamented the “ideological” agenda of “consciousness-raising” that “target[s] the male sex.”4 Joan Ringelheim, a pioneer in the study of women’s experiences during the Holocaust, also recalls harsh criticism launched against her research, in her case by Jewish American novelist Cynthia Ozick. “You are asking a morally wrong question,” Ozick charged, for it would lead “down the road of eradicating Jews from history.” For Ozick, to differentiate between Jewish men and women meant an erasure of their Jewishness. “Your project is, in my view, an ambitious falsehood,” Ozick argued. “The Holocaust happened to victims who were not seen as men, women, or children, but as Jews” (qtd. in Ringelheim 1990, 144). In such equations, studying the nexus of genocide and gender is seen as unproductive, and a gender-differentiated analysis is perceived as a threat to the interpretation of the Holocaust as a unifying experience of a people. More recently, historian Annette Timm recalls a conversation she had with her male adviser when working on her PhD in Berlin in the 1990s. At that time, the adviser dismissed any research on “the rape of German women by invading Soviet soldiers” as a marginal topic “unworthy of serious historical investigation” (Timm 2017, 351). Those critics, no doubt, would express similar consternation today if they encountered a critical men’s studies perspective on the Holocaust.

Though feminist scholarship has received the brunt of criticism, caustic remarks and sweeping claims regarding the study of masculinities in the Holocaust can be found, perhaps ironically, among gender and feminist studies scholars, where a men’s studies perspective has not always received an easy welcome. Rather than being considered an enrichment to the research on women in the Holocaust, anecdotal evidence points to the puzzlement that such an approach elicits. Haynes, for example, recalls the reactions of a panel on women’s voices in the Holocaust at a 1997 academic conference when he asked whether their work might open “the way for a consideration of men’s experiences in the Holocaust.” Not intending his question to be polemic, the responses he received “indicated that they regarded my question as a threat, as one more in a series of male attempts to silence or marginalize their voices” (2015, 166). At other times, scholars who have advanced our understanding of women’s experiences in the Holocaust have made sweeping claims about masculinity, stating, for example, that the Nazi camps were the “ultimate expression of the extreme masculinity and misogyny that undergirded Nazi ideology,” which was ruled by “the perverted patriarchal bureaucracy” of “one of the most women-hating regimes of the modern world.”5 Though it is beyond dispute that the violence in the camps was extreme, the administration of genocidal practices perverted, and the regime’s misogynist policies controlling women’s bodies and lives repulsive, to lay blame mono-causally—at least on a rhetorical level—on masculinity leaves little room to explore men’s lived experiences. It explains little, for example, about layers of complicity; it cannot account for the discrepancies between ideals of militarized masculinity and the lives of real men who became accomplices and beneficiaries; it does not distinguish between ideologically trained, elite Nazi units who, by and large, truly believed in their genocidal mission and ordinary men undergoing the “soldiering” process by which they became “what military institutions desire and in which they acquire certain martial characteristics through exposure to and repetition of particular practices and skills” (Krondorfer and Westermann 2017, 19).

Objections raised against a gender studies approach are often more subtle than blatant. As regards women’s experiences, Holocaust historians have vacillated on the validity of investigating gender differences. While, for example, some have argued that experiences were frequently based on “situational accident” rather than a “gender-driven choice” (Langer 1998, 362), others, like Raul Hilberg and Yehuda Bauer, have recognized the importance of gendered approaches even when they themselves did not pursue them forcefully and consistently.6 Likewise, though with inverse focus, feminist scholarship has recognized the importance of an inclusive understanding of gender but frequently consigns the subject of masculinity to marginal comments and footnotes; or it carries “gender” in the title of publications but proceeds exclusively with women’s history without further explanation.7 Other scholars have developed a fine sensitivity to men’s experiences while their work remains concentrated on women. Lenore Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, for example, are concerned about too narrow a view on women’s experiences (such as sexuality and motherhood), because it “marginalizes women and, ironically reinforces the male experience as the ‘master narrative.’ ” It is important, they continue, “to pay attention to the particularity of gendered wounding that both sexes experienced” (Weitzman and Ofer 1998, 16).

A purposeful critical men’s studies approach (e.g., Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Krondorfer 2009; Hearn 1997; Hearn and Collinson 1994) provides incentives to investigate the ways in which men negotiate their various roles or the choices they make during times of pressure, scarcity, threats, and opportunities. While, on the one hand, a critical men’s studies approach exposes the violent nature of hardened male perpetrators, it equally invites a more nuanced analysis of male agency in the gray zone, whether it pertains to degrees of culpable wrongdoing or compromised options of survival in ghettos, hiding places, and the camps. With a few exceptions, the majority of scholars, whether in the male-dominated field of Holocaust history or feminist scholarship, has sidestepped the analysis of men as gendered beings. As Carey put it in the context of Jewish men (though her analysis can be applied more widely), previous research resulted in a “highly problematic, minimal history of Jewish masculinity during the Holocaust” (2017, 5).

As the scholarly landscape is gradually changing, gender is now often understood in relational and intersectional terms in which it is investigated as an experience of women and men across levels of complicity, age, class, location, sexualities, and racialized identities. What needs to be carried forward is the importance of addressing power and privilege of men in modern nation-states that operate within a more or less enduring patriarchal social order; at the same time, it is important to enrich such analysis with the granularity of male experiences on micro- and meso-social levels as well as with an awareness of the conceptual obstacles that leave normative assumptions untouched. I believe that we are at a place well poised to probe further and more deeply the implications of a critical men’s studies approach to the Holocaust and—insofar as it intersects with Nazi ideology and the German war effort—to Nazism and the Second World War.

Select Examples

A few examples from earlier publications will illustrate the kind of insights related to men and masculinities that can be teased out of available materials and documents. Those examples show what scholarship has accomplished so far, and how and why it will benefit from widening its scope and refining its conceptual and theoretical frames.

The Myth of the Solitary Male Fighter

For a while, it was assumed that male Holocaust survivors fought mostly for themselves in the camps while women formed relational bonds in order to survive. Given a social context that valorized independence as a manly virtue, it is not surprising that many male testimonies credit a solitary struggle and independent decision-making as their reasons for survival. Ironically, external expectations and self-perceptions of male independence might have affected men adversely in the camps: in a situation where all subjectivity was destroyed, not to let go of the ego was a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Genocide
• Part II: Aftermath
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover