In most histories of nationalism and nation-state formation, domesticity is part of the banal side of nationalism, one of its timeless and private aspects that “blend[s] into the fabric of daily life” (p. 1) and are hardly noticeable to its citizens. Drawing upon national and regional archival collections as well as an impressive array of housewives' journals, magazines, and weekly newspaper supplements, Nancy Reagin traces the ways in which domesticity informed and was shaped by changing notions of nation and national identity from the Kaiserreich through World War II. During the nation's first decades when domesticity was less formalized, the artifacts and practices of keeping house, displaying Wohlstand, and celebrating holidays were shaped by local and regional traditions, handed down from one generation of female family members to the next. One of the trajectories Reagin traces is the congealing of an “imagined community” of German housewives from the disparate symbols and norms of domesticity, a process that was parallel to the growing cohesion of both the German nation and its Bürgertum. Associational networks and the printed word—the proliferation of housewives' magazines and manuals—fostered the formation of this community, one that remained out of reach for women of the working class or rural farms.
In the era of imperial expansion the domestic values of thrift, order, and cleanliness became a yardstick in demarcating Germany from other nations. Domesticity served not only to demarcate national character, including a domestic version of German “Qualitätsarbeit,” or “joy in work,” but also to underscore the differences in cleanliness, thrift, and order in colonial and native households. The custodial project of domesticity, which bourgeois women began at home with urban working-class women, was extended to Germany's colonies, where it helped to establish new racial and sexual boundaries of national belonging. Although domesticity was already quite politicized in the era of colonialism, Reagin reserves the term “politicization of housework” for World War I and its aftermath. The scant five pages on the war scarcely do justice to the crucial changes that took place as the militarized state sought to bring private households under its purview, deploying those custodians of domesticity, the National Women's Service (Nationaler Frauendienst), “to mold housewives' shopping and cooking habits to meet the needs of a wartime economy” (p. 74). Domesticity became politicized, Reagin argues, as membership in both urban and rural housewives' associations expanded rapidly after the war. By 1929 both the urban and rural housewives' associations sought affiliation with center-right political parties, embracing the nation over the republic. The close connections between leadership in the housewives' associations and the DVP/DNVP, as well as the slight female majority among voters for these parties in the later Weimar Republic, lead Reagin to conclude that housewives' interests were “well-represented within both right-wing parties” (p. 83). This claim seems anomalous in view of historians' findings that Weimar political parties were eager to have female votes but incorporated women's interests only marginally into their programs. Here Reagin relies on a conventional notion of politics and politicization which the notion of domesticity itself invites us to question.
In the aftermath of World War I, the more diffuse “imagined community” of German housewives was supplanted by a social movement of highly organized citizens and voters, who not only articulated standpoints on trade and consumption, rationalization and reproduction, but also sought to elevate the professional status of housework by defining it as a Beruf. During the Weimar Republic, when the very parameters of domesticity—the market for consumer goods and the technologies of housework—were changing rapidly, the housewives' associations took a protectionist and nationalist stance on consumer issues, initiating “Buy German” campaigns during the Great Depression and distinguishing labor-intensive and quality German housework from the soullessness of American domesticity. By 1932 the two largest housewives' associations broke with the Bund deutscher Frauen (BDF) and declared their loyalty to the Harzburg Front, firmly rejecting the BDF's advocacy for women in favor of their own concentration on family, Volk, and nation. While the Catholic housewives' association voluntarily disbanded in 1933, the rural and urban housewives' groups and their nationalized visions of domesticity and housewifery were quickly subsumed into the Nazi women's bureau.
In the last three chapters of her book, Nancy Reagin offers a persuasive and compelling analysis of the place of domesticity in visions of the Volksgemeinschaft, in the remaking of the Nazi economy during the Four-Year Plan, and in the resettlement of Poland as one act in the history of the Nazi war of annihilation. The referent of domesticity was no longer the nation but the racialized peoples' community. Reagin analyzes the proliferation of institutions, advice centers, courses, and schools that mobilized millions of German and Austrian women on its behalf. She also suggests that the ideological parameters of domesticity shifted during the Third Reich as childbearing and child rearing moved to center stage. Female bureaucrats and experts deployed domesticity as a means of establishing and enforcing racial and social boundaries, the most extreme example of which was the Hashude Educational Settlement in Bremen for “asocial” families, which Reagin terms a “domestic reeducation camp” (p. 111).
At the same time the Nazis needed to conscript housewives to join the drive for autarky and rearmament that comprised the Four-Year Plan. In domestic science courses women learned to contend with shortages of food, fuel, and consumer goods as Germany prepared for war. As Reagin shows, even the highly effective Nazi propaganda efforts could not entirely dispel the memories of shortages on the home front during World War I. She uncovers intriguing instances when housewives spurned the exhortations of the Women's Bureau to cut back on foodstuffs, heat, or clothing. Indeed, women's consent to the war economy, and ultimately to the war itself, was negotiated around the invocations of shared domestic practices: the Tischgemeinschaft became the anchor of Volksgemeinschaft, which was formed around the management of shortages—the Eintopfsonntag or donations to the Winterhilfswerk, thereby situating domesticity at the heart of its racialized and gendered social complex (p. 126). Once the Nazis launched their war of expansion and annihilation in the east, domestic expertise came to encompass the expropriation, “cleansing,” and Aryanization of households and artifacts that Jewish residents had left behind as they fled or faced deportation. The Nazis dispatched female experts from various bureaucracies to participate in the processes of selection and deportation of Jews and Poles to eastern Poland, first expunging their physical presence with thorough cleansings of households and goods and then deploying expert housewives to oversee the resocialization of Volksdeutsche as Germans.
Nancy Reagin offers compelling evidence for the crucial relevance of domesticity to the history of nation and national identity in Germany, particularly as it expanded its borders through colonialism and war. She makes clear that domesticity was neither banal nor an unchanging foundation for German national identity and offers subtle and significant insights into its changing idioms, practices, and locations within the complex of German governance. As such, Reagin succeeds in moving the history of gender to the center of the history of nation and state, war and conquest. In this endeavor she joins a number of other scholars, such as Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, Raffael Scheck, Elizabeth Harvey, Ute Planert, Kirsten Heinsohn, Christine Streubel, and Angelika Schaser, who have analyzed the place of women and gender in German conservatism, nationalism, racial subordination, and war. In this vibrant and productive field, Reagin's book is notable for its focus on the ideologies and practices, ideals and symbols of domesticity rather than on the women's organizations or female figureheads who shaped it and for the long time span it pursues. A final question remains as to whether Benedict Anderson's analytic of “imagined community” is a productive framework and whether Reagin blurs the important distinction between the ideology of domesticity and the practices of housekeeping, analyzing them as parallel phenomena throughout the book. While ideology prevails in the first chapters of the book in the form of ideals, templates, standards, and norms, practices become the focus in the chapters on World War I, Nazism, and World War II. Did the process of politicization replace ideology with organization, or was domesticity subsumed into Nazi ideologies of Volksgemeinschaft, Lebensraum, and race? Reagin's study raises important questions about how we might situate the resurgent and apparently depoliticized domesticity of the 1950s in West Germany in the trajectory she outlines.
