As a large, interdisciplinary body of scholarship has shown, Nazi Germany was in many respects media-made. Deborah Barton’s excellent book, Writing and Rewriting the Reich, marks an important addition to this scholarship by telling the little-known story of women journalists and photojournalists from the beginning of the Nazi period through 1955. In seven chapters organized both chronologically and thematically, Barton convincingly argues that women journalists played an important role in supporting the goals of the Nazi press, despite being underrepresented in the field. In fact, far from denying women work in print media on account of their gender, Nazi press officials claimed that women were uniquely suited to “influence the public, specifically German women, through charm and subtlety, rather than through the militant language that dominated much of the press” (2). Barton conducts historical analysis on an extensive amount of material that encompasses sources on and by more than 1,500 women journalists, most unknown, from more than a dozen German and European archives.
As Chapter 3 demonstrates, some women journalists were active in the traditionally male domain of hard news, as foreign correspondents who promoted Germany’s expansionist and racist policies from abroad. Most, however, worked in fashion, travel, entertainment, and lifestyle, including family and motherhood. As Barton argues in Chapter 2, these areas afforded women journalists a “soft power” that was nonetheless profoundly ideological, aimed both at entertainment and the normalization of Nazi policies, including exclusionary notions of the Volksgemeinschaft. As Barton notes in her introduction, journalists working in hard and soft news alike “both veiled and beautified processes of violence within and outside of the borders of Germany” (12).
Occlusion and diversion became even more important after 1943, as continuous bombing wore down homefront morale. Against this backdrop, women journalists “encouraged readers to retreat into private pleasure, hobbies, and everyday life, which allowed the public to better cope with their wartime reality” (144). This kind of “retreat” is precisely the subject of and context for Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s 1943 entertainment film Großstadtmelodie (Metropolitan Melody), which follows a provincial female photographer who pursues a career as a photojournalist in prewar Berlin. As a film that depicts a fictionalized version of one of the many women journalists Barton examines in her book, Großstadtmelodie would have been an interesting narrative foil for Barton to explore.
Barton’s book joins a growing body of research that has shown how women participated in the Nazi regime, challenging the idea that 1933 signaled an unequivocal return of women to the home. As Barton points out, a higher total percentage of women journalists worked in the Nazi press than was the case during the Weimar Republic. As in the Weimar years, women journalists in the Nazi era saw their work as a career, not a temporary distraction from or stop on the way to family life. In Chapter 1, Barton examines how women became professional journalists under the Nazis and how they were successfully trained as political employees who were allowed to be part of the press without being highly visible. Contradictions like these—between visibility and invisibility, opportunity and control—tended to define women’s work as journalists, including the distance between the content of women’s writing, which upheld conservative traditional values, and the real lives of the working women behind the articles they wrote.
The transition from wartime to peacetime—the start of the Cold War and the founding of the two Germanys (Chapter 6)—is among the book’s most important interventions, tracing how women journalists were able to exculpate themselves from any complicity in Nazi crimes through their dual position as both insiders and outsiders in the press. The story of these women journalists likewise extends beyond 1955, tracing the impact of their diaries and memoirs up to the present, as Chapter 7 examines through four case studies of women journalists who published autobiographical writing about their experiences of Nazi Germany and its defeat. These case studies show the different ways these journalists “marketed a distorted version of Germany’s Third Reich experience to German and transnational audiences after 1945” (245).
One argument Barton might have further developed is her brief framing in her introduction and conclusion of women journalists as “implicated subjects,” drawing on Michael Rothberg’s influential concept. As Barton points out, although women journalists remained on the peripheries of power, they nonetheless benefited from and contributed to the Nazi regime. How we are to view these women, whether as implicated subjects, as complicit observers, or as perpetrators, has important consequences for how we are to understand contemporary relationships among power, media, and gender today. As Barton notes in the final lines of her conclusion, what may appear apolitical “can work to the benefit of nefarious systems that cloak violent ideology behind soft news, as we continue to see today” (250). Barton leaves what “we continue to see today” unnamed, though readers will hardly have trouble coming up with their own examples, from the tradwife movement and right-wing wellness influencers to women journalists and media personalities who make no secret of their alliance with Trumpism.
Barton quotes Joseph Goebbels’s infamous statement that “the best propaganda is that which works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without [audiences] having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative” (75). Barton’s study makes women journalists visible and names their work as political. It invites us to confront how women were able to become agents of power and even propaganda, however limited and constrained. Barton’s book is required reading for historians of twentieth-century Germany and Europe, German studies scholars, media studies scholars, and anyone interested in the myriad ways that fascism is supported, sustained, and accommodated.
