In his acclaimed book "How Fascism Works", Jason Stanley presents eight different aspects of fascist politics; one of them is sexual anxiety (cf. Stanley 2018: xxxi), in which the male-centered gender hierarchy is threatened by womanhood and gender equity. Stanley further explains how totalitarian leaders work with creating and solidifying division, aiming to separate "us" into "them" (cf. Stanley 2018: xxx). Inspired by these notions, I designed an online course in German Studies titled "Fascism & Resistance: Propaganda and Ideology in German Literature and Culture" for undergraduate students in the United States. One course unit focusses on Concentration Camps and the Holocaust wherein I decided to put the emphasis on 'teaching through the eyes of women' to show how fascist sexual anxiety and division caused loss, trauma and death.
In this paper, I will present and discuss my approach and my teaching materials. The students, for instance, learn about stories of multinational and multilingual European women who – some of them as children or young adults – were interned in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for political or religious reasons or because of their Roma identity. I argue that this perspective enhances the students' understanding of the Holocaust as not only a term for the extermination of European Jewry by German Fascism. Ravensbrück (near Berlin) was one of the concentration camps on German ground that ran from 1939 until 1945 and was liberated by the Soviet Army. In historical discourse it is mainly known as a 'women only' camp, however, there were also men interned there. In my course unit, I further implement the "The Excursion of the Dead Girls" by Anna Seghers, a novella about the fate of a group of high school girls during the two world wars and Nazi terror, and the movie "Aimée and Jaguar" by Max Färberböck, exploring the lives of Felice Schragenheim and Lilly Wust and their tragic love story. All the materials can be considered autobiographical or autofictional.
I think by analysing autobiographic narratives and autofictional stories in literature and film makes German Fascism and the Holocaust more graspable for students. They experience a stronger connection to the fascists divisive, misogynist and homophobic politics once they have heard stories of people who experienced it in the past. My approach also counteracts the prevalence of male accounts. My focus of bringing the perspective of women into the college classroom aims to contribute to Holocaust research and pedagogy in times of rising nationalism and male supremacy.
