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Jennifer Lynn, Writing and Rewriting the Reich: Women Journalists in the Nazi and Post-War Press, German History, Volume 42, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 460–462, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghae034
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Extract
In an impressively researched and compelling read, Writing and Rewriting the Reich: Women Journalists in the Nazi and Post-War Press makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of the Third Reich and postwar West Germany. Deborah Barton’s book intersects with the historiography on gender and German history, female perpetrators in the Third Reich, and postwar memory. Her work explores women’s agency as journalists, how they navigated power in the Third Reich, their role in covering or hiding Nazi brutality and, significantly, how they used gendered assumptions of ‘apolitical’ work to rewrite their own narratives after 1945.
Barton’s analysis reveals that the Nazi regime utilized women journalists in a variety of ways: as agents of ‘soft power’ which normalized everyday life in the Third Reich; as women who ‘beautified’ war and occupation; and as writers who propagated National Socialist ideology. Analysing the complex negotiations surrounding gender and power, Barton shows that even as women occupied a subordinated position in Nazi Germany, privileged women built their careers as journalists and reaped the benefits from their status in the racially defined Third Reich.
