BOOKS
EVERYDAY LIFE UNDER HITLER
MOTHERS IN THE FATHERLAND: WOMEN , THE FAMILY, AND NAZI
POLITICS. By Claudia Koonz.
St. Martin's Press. $25.00.
IN HITLER'S GERMANY: DAILY LI FE IN THE THIRD REICH . By Bernt
Engelmann. Translated by Krishna Winston.
Pantheon. $21.95.
A SCRAP OF TIME AND OTHER STORIES. By Ida Fink.
Pantheon. $15.95.
Ever since Fernand Braudel published
La Mediterannee,
historians, when examining national and economic development,
fascism arid modernization, statecraft and the outcome ofwars , have
been divided about how much emphasis to put on the everyday ex–
periences of ordinary people and their families. By the 1970s, studies
in the genre of E . P . Thompson's
The Making of the English Working
Class,
Le Roy Ladurie's
Montaillou,
and Robert Darnton's
The Great
Cat Massacre
started to outnumber those focusing on geopolitical and
theoretical issues . It was inevitable that the balance of recent Ger–
man historiography as well would be tipping away from such large
themes as Franz Neumann's
Behemoth,
William Shirer's
The Rise
and Fall
of
the Third Reich,
and Hannah Arendt's
The Origins of
Totalitarianism.
Historians opposing the focus on microhistory maintain that it
plays loose with questions of socialism and capitalism, political
leadership and national traditions , and with the influence of church
and religion . This may well be true . However, one could argue that
the large themes of German history after World War I have been
amply explored, and that books such as Claudia Koonz's
Mothers in
the Fatherland,
Berndt Englemann's
In Hitler's Germany: Everyday Life in
the Third Reich
and Ida Fink's
A Scrap of Time
fill in the gaps in a
literature consisting of over fifty thousand books and monographs.
Each of these books supplements what we know - in very different
ways . Koonz's scholarly work pinpoints the place of women ;
Engelmann's memoir reports on a group of resisters , and Fink's fic–
tional accounts evoke the terror of innocent victims who know they
will be put to death .
Claudia Koonz brilliantly differentiates between German
women within the Third Reich, between those who supported
Hitler , and those who resisted , acquiesced, or became victims . We
know that many women helped him to power, believing that he was
