Thesis (M.A.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanties, English Literature, 2013 / This dissertation functions as an exploration of German author Bernhard Schlink’s engagement with the genre of Vӓterliteratur (Literature about Fathers). By examining how Schlink has used adaptations of this genre in his novels The Reader (1998), Homecoming (2009) and short story Girl with Lizard (2002), this project will attempt to ascertain the extent to which one can view these texts as part of a new wave of father writing that has emerged in the German post-unification space. The question dominating this research project and contained in the first part of the title: “How do I speak about the Past”, implies that part of this research will examine Schlink’s portrayal of the second-generation’s attempt to understand and give voice to their experiences in postwar Germany. As such, my work engages with the emergence of Vӓterliteratur as being the result of an incomplete attempt by second-generation Germans to confront Germany’s national traumatic past during the 1968 Student Movement. However, while Schlink’s work demonstrates a familiarity with the content, structure and themes present in the first wave of Vӓterliteratur he appears to rewrite these into a fictionalised format, demonstrating the continued need in German society to work through the past. In many respects the texts selected for analysis in this dissertation deviate from the traditional conventions found within the earlier father novels, and interestingly appear to emphasise the previously marginalised role of women both during and postwar. What I will demonstrate is that while Schlink’s work makes use of the conventions found in Vӓterliteratur, and by doing so explores the postwar relationships between fathers and sons, it also indirectly engages with the experiences of German women and their own perpetration of, or suffering as a result of the patriarchal attitudes present in, Nazism. Through this dual portrayal (the presence of both men and women) Schlink gives a new perspective to the complexities of German postwar life as seen through the eyes of the second-generation.

O partido nazista no Brasil (1928-1938) estava inserido em uma rede de filiais deste partido instaladas em 83 países do mundo e comandadas pela Organização do Partido Nazista no Exterior, cuja sede era em Berlim. O grupo instalado no Brasil teve a maior célula fora da Alemanha com 2900 integrantes sendo estruturado de acordo com regras e diretrizes do modelo organizacional do III Reich. A realidade brasileira interveio nesse processo causando o que chamamos de tropicalização do nazismo. A história do desenvolvimento da ação do partido no Brasil será analisada nos 17 estados brasileiros onde estava presente, tendo como contexto histórico a complexidade das relações Brasil e Alemanha durante o período da Era Vargas, a relação com o integralismo e eventuais conflitos raciais com a população brasileira e com judeus imigrados. Ênfase será dada ao papel do chefe do partido nazista no Brasil, Hans Henning von Cossel, considerado como Führer tupiniquim, tendo como fonte entrevistas com seus familiares. Contém extenso material iconográfico de documentos de época. / The Nazi party in Brazil (1928-1938) was inserted in a branch net spread in 83 countries around the world and headed by the Nazi Party Foreign Organization, whose seat was settled in Berlin. The group installed in Brazil had the major cell outside Germany with 2900 members and was structured according to the III Reich organizational model rules and policies. The Brazilian reality interfered in this process causing what is called the tropicalization of the Nazism. The history of the party actions development in Brazil will be analyzed in the 17 Brazilian states where it had a spot, having as a historical context the complexity of the Germany-Brazil connection during the Vargas Age, the relationship with the Integralism and the occasional racial conflicts with the Brazilian people and the immigrated Jews. Special attention will be given to the role of the Nazi party commander in Brazil, Hans Henning von Cossel who was considered as the native Führer, using interviews with his relatives as wellspring. The thesis contains a vast iconographic material of the period documents.

O partido nazista no Brasil (1928-1938) estava inserido em uma rede de filiais deste partido instaladas em 83 países do mundo e comandadas pela Organização do Partido Nazista no Exterior, cuja sede era em Berlim. O grupo instalado no Brasil teve a maior célula fora da Alemanha com 2900 integrantes sendo estruturado de acordo com regras e diretrizes do modelo organizacional do III Reich. A realidade brasileira interveio nesse processo causando o que chamamos de tropicalização do nazismo. A história do desenvolvimento da ação do partido no Brasil será analisada nos 17 estados brasileiros onde estava presente, tendo como contexto histórico a complexidade das relações Brasil e Alemanha durante o período da Era Vargas, a relação com o integralismo e eventuais conflitos raciais com a população brasileira e com judeus imigrados. Ênfase será dada ao papel do chefe do partido nazista no Brasil, Hans Henning von Cossel, considerado como Führer tupiniquim, tendo como fonte entrevistas com seus familiares. Contém extenso material iconográfico de documentos de época. / The Nazi party in Brazil (1928-1938) was inserted in a branch net spread in 83 countries around the world and headed by the Nazi Party Foreign Organization, whose seat was settled in Berlin. The group installed in Brazil had the major cell outside Germany with 2900 members and was structured according to the III Reich organizational model rules and policies. The Brazilian reality interfered in this process causing what is called the tropicalization of the Nazism. The history of the party actions development in Brazil will be analyzed in the 17 Brazilian states where it had a spot, having as a historical context the complexity of the Germany-Brazil connection during the Vargas Age, the relationship with the Integralism and the occasional racial conflicts with the Brazilian people and the immigrated Jews. Special attention will be given to the role of the Nazi party commander in Brazil, Hans Henning von Cossel who was considered as the native Führer, using interviews with his relatives as wellspring. The thesis contains a vast iconographic material of the period documents.

This thesis is a study and analysis of Nazi propaganda, specifically focusing on the medium of film. Throughout Hitler’s Third Reich, propaganda played a vital role in maintaining popular support for the party platform in addition to fueling the convictions of the Nazi elite. There are three main divisions to this study. First, an overview of the structure and organization of Nazi Germany and particularly The Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda will be given, followed by an exploration of the origins and evolution of anti-Semitism in the Third Reich. Last, two Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda films will be analyzed to exemplify the whole of Nazi propaganda. Specifically, an emphasis will be made that these films played a significant role in solidifying and sustaining the mentalities and actions desired by the Nazi regime. Consequently, these films can be correlated to historical events which occurred before and after 1940.

The historiography of women in Nazi Germany attests to the various roles of women in the Third Reich. Although politically invisible, women were deeply involved in the Nazi regime, whether they supported the Party or not. During Nazi racial schemes, men formed and executed Nazi racial programs, but women participated in Nazi racism as students, nurses, and violent perpetrators. Early studies of German women during World War II focused on the lack of Nazi mobilization of women into the wartime labor force, but many women already held positions in the labor force before the war. Nazi mistreatment of lower-class working women and the violence against their own people, as well as Allied terror bombing and mass rape, proved the Nazis inept at protecting German women. The historiography of women in Nazi Germany is complex and controversial but proves the importance of women in the male dominated regime.

The purpose of this study is to seek knowledge of how eugenics justified extreme racial policy, territorial expansion, committing unprecedented crimes against humanity; and to understand why and how eighty million human beings yielded to totalitarianism and racial murder. Further, by examining Nazi science and policies, through the lens of concentration/extermination camps at Dachau and Auschwitz, we sought to understand the linkage between scientific racism, Nazi ideology and genocide. Critiquing Germany’s failure to exercise sound science and morality in its occupation, subjugation, and depopulation during WW II, this paper will argue Nazi Germany’s evolution to systematized, industrial mass murder of Untermenschen (or “subhumans”) ‘justified’ their territorial expansion, and the elimination of whole populations based on the concept of an inferior class war. Consequently, my research indicates apathy and greed, ignorance and intolerance will inevitably pull society into the abyss of perdition, thus services humanity as a grave warning to remember the fallacy of racial intolerance.

Much of the discussion of German National Socialism has historically focused on of Adolf Hitler as the architect of the Nazi state. While recognizing Hitler’s central role in the development of National Socialism, this thesis contends that he was not a lone actor. Much of the ideological and structural development National Socialism was driven by senior individuals within the party who were able to leverage their influence to institutionalize personal variants of National Socialism within broader party ideology. To explore the role of other ideologues in the development of Nazi ideology, this thesis examines how Hitler’s leadership style perpetuated factionalism, how when and by whom central elements of Nazi ideology were introduced, as well the ideological sources from which these concepts were adapted. After the party’s ultimate rise to power Hitler, always centrally positioned, eliminated internal competition and institutionalized his own variant of National Socialism whilst co-opting the concepts and structures developed by other ideologues that offered useful tools to pursue his goals. Through this analysis, this thesis seeks to demonstrate how the foundational elements of National Socialism took form, even before the party achieved power, and how these elements were subsequently utilized to consolidate Nazi control over the German state. Above all else, this thesis sheds much-needed light on the pivotal role of individuals and the conflict between them that engineered the cataclysm of the Third Reich.

Under the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945) a calculated killing of chronic “mentally ill” patients took place that was part of a large biopolitical program using well-established, contemporary scientific standards on the understanding of eugenics. Nearly 300,000 patients were assassinated during this period. Nurses executed this program through their everyday practice. However, suspicions have been raised that psychiatric patients were already assassinated before and after the Nazi regime, suggesting that the motives for these killings must be investigated within psychiatric practice itself. My research aims to highlight the mechanisms and scientific discourses in place that allowed nurses to perceive patients as unworthy of life, and thus able to be killed. Using Foucauldian concepts of “biopower” and “State racism,” this discourse analysis is carried out on several levels. First, it analyzes nursing notes in one specific patient record and interprets them in relation to the kinds of scientific discourses that are identified, for example, in nursing journals between 1900 and 1945. Second, it argues that records are not static but rather produce certain effects; they are “performative” because they are active agents. Psychiatry, with its need to make patients completely visible and its desire to maintain its dominance in the psychiatric field, requires the utilization of writing in order to register everything that happens to individuals, everything they do and everything they talk about. Furthermore, writing enables nurses to pass along information from the “bottom-up,” and written documents allow all information to be accessible at any time. It is a method of centralizing information and of coordinating different levels within disciplinary systems. By following this approach it is possible to demonstrate that the production of meaning within nurses’ notes is not based on the intentionality of the writer but rather depends on discursive patterns constructed by contemporary scientific discourses. Using a form of “institutional ethnography,” the study analyzes documents as “inscriptions” that actively interven in interactions in institutions and that create a specific reality on their own accord. The question is not whether the reality represented within the documents is true, but rather how documents worked in institutions and what their effects were. Third, the study demonstrates how nurses were actively involved in the construction of patients’ identities and how these “documentary identities” led to the death of thousands of humans whose lives were considered to be “unworthy lives.” Documents are able to constitute the identities of psychiatric patients and, conversely, are able to deconstruct them. The result of de-subjectification was that “zones for the unliving” existed in psychiatric hospitals long before the Nazi regime and within these zones, patients were exposed to an increased risk of death. An analysis of the nursing notes highlights that nurses played a decisive role in constructing these “zones” and had an important strategic function in them. Psychiatric hospitals became spaces where patients were reduced to a “bare life;” these spaces were comparable with the concentration camps of the Holocaust. This analysis enables the integration of nursing practices under National Socialism into the history of modernity. Nursing under Nazism was not simply a relapse into barbarism; Nazi exclusionary practices were extreme variants of scientific, social, and political exclusionary practices that were already in place. Different types of power are identifiable in the Nazi regime, even those that Foucault called “technologies of the self” were demonstrated, for example, by the denunciation of “disabled persons” by nurses. Nurses themselves were able to employ techniques of power in the Nazi regime.

In the post-Second World War period, the medium of film has been arguably the leading popular culture protagonist of a demonized Adolf Hitler. Between 1968 and 1990, thirty-five English-language films featuring representations of Hitler were released in cinemas, on television, or on home video. In the 1968 to 1979 period, fifteen films were released, with the remaining twenty coming between 1980 and 1990. This increase reveals not only a growing popular fascination with Hitler, but also a tendency to use the Führer as a sign for demonic evil. These representations are broken into three categories (1) prominent; (2) satirical; (3) contextualizing which are then analyzed according to whether a representation is demonizing or humanizing. Out of these thirty-five films, twenty-three can be labeled as demonizing and nine as humanizing, and there are three films that cannot be appropriately located in either category. In the 1968 to 1979 period, four films employed prominent Hitler representations, five films satirized Hitler, with six contextualizing films. The 1980s played host to five prominent representations, six satires, and nine contextualizing films. In total, there are nine prominent representations, eleven satires and fifteen contextualizing films. Arguing that prominent representations are the most influential, this study argues that the 1968 to 1979 period formed and shaped the sign of a demonic Führer, and its acceptance is demonstrated by films released between1980 and 1990. However, the appearance of two prominent films in the 1980s which humanized Hitler is significant, for these two films hint at the beginnings of a breakdown in the hegemony of the Hitler sign. The cinematic demonization of Hitler is accomplished in a variety of ways, all of which portray the National Socialist leader as an abstract figure outside of human behaviour and comprehension. Scholarly history is also shown to have contributed to this mythologizing, as the survival myth and myth of the last ten days have their origins in historiography. However, since the 1970s film has arguably overtaken historiography in shaping popular conceptions of the National Socialist leader. In addition to pointing out the connections between film and historiography, this study also suggests other political, philosophical, and cultural reasons for the demonization of Adolf Hitler.

Under the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945) a calculated killing of chronic “mentally ill” patients took place that was part of a large biopolitical program using well-established, contemporary scientific standards on the understanding of eugenics. Nearly 300,000 patients were assassinated during this period. Nurses executed this program through their everyday practice. However, suspicions have been raised that psychiatric patients were already assassinated before and after the Nazi regime, suggesting that the motives for these killings must be investigated within psychiatric practice itself. My research aims to highlight the mechanisms and scientific discourses in place that allowed nurses to perceive patients as unworthy of life, and thus able to be killed. Using Foucauldian concepts of “biopower” and “State racism,” this discourse analysis is carried out on several levels. First, it analyzes nursing notes in one specific patient record and interprets them in relation to the kinds of scientific discourses that are identified, for example, in nursing journals between 1900 and 1945. Second, it argues that records are not static but rather produce certain effects; they are “performative” because they are active agents. Psychiatry, with its need to make patients completely visible and its desire to maintain its dominance in the psychiatric field, requires the utilization of writing in order to register everything that happens to individuals, everything they do and everything they talk about. Furthermore, writing enables nurses to pass along information from the “bottom-up,” and written documents allow all information to be accessible at any time. It is a method of centralizing information and of coordinating different levels within disciplinary systems. By following this approach it is possible to demonstrate that the production of meaning within nurses’ notes is not based on the intentionality of the writer but rather depends on discursive patterns constructed by contemporary scientific discourses. Using a form of “institutional ethnography,” the study analyzes documents as “inscriptions” that actively interven in interactions in institutions and that create a specific reality on their own accord. The question is not whether the reality represented within the documents is true, but rather how documents worked in institutions and what their effects were. Third, the study demonstrates how nurses were actively involved in the construction of patients’ identities and how these “documentary identities” led to the death of thousands of humans whose lives were considered to be “unworthy lives.” Documents are able to constitute the identities of psychiatric patients and, conversely, are able to deconstruct them. The result of de-subjectification was that “zones for the unliving” existed in psychiatric hospitals long before the Nazi regime and within these zones, patients were exposed to an increased risk of death. An analysis of the nursing notes highlights that nurses played a decisive role in constructing these “zones” and had an important strategic function in them. Psychiatric hospitals became spaces where patients were reduced to a “bare life;” these spaces were comparable with the concentration camps of the Holocaust. This analysis enables the integration of nursing practices under National Socialism into the history of modernity. Nursing under Nazism was not simply a relapse into barbarism; Nazi exclusionary practices were extreme variants of scientific, social, and political exclusionary practices that were already in place. Different types of power are identifiable in the Nazi regime, even those that Foucault called “technologies of the self” were demonstrated, for example, by the denunciation of “disabled persons” by nurses. Nurses themselves were able to employ techniques of power in the Nazi regime.