Graduate Journal of Social Science

This article gives insight into a research project still in progress about diaries written by as German acknowledged women during National Socialism, particularly, the Second World War and the period immediately after the War and the breakdown of the NS system. Such research from a feminist standpoint proves to be complicated. On the one hand, women were marginalised by the fascist system. On the other, being acknowledged as German granted them privileges over those considered non-German or degenerated (ranging from being included in the welfare state system to the privilege of not being sterilised and/or murdered). The interest in this analysis is an archaeological investigation of cultural memory of this period still influential. Apart from this discussion the paper entails an example of an interdisciplinary feminist analysis of passages of two diaries written immediately after the breakdown of the system. The methodology is a discourse analytical approach that makes use of studies from different disciplinary contexts in order to show the different discursive layers within the texts such as the image of the female comrade of a soldier and the unfaithful women. In both cases, aspects of a 'new' female German identity become visible in which parts of the 'old' German identity were transformed and re-integrated. This process involved the rejection of aspects clearly linked to the NS system and, not surprisingly, a projection of the immorality of this system onto women who sexually engage with foreign soldiers. Thus, making them responsible for the betrayal of the national German community just as the NS system had done prior.