Marking Time Women and Nazi Propaganda Art during World War II

"Marking Time" considers the relative scarcity of woman's image in Nazi propaganda posters during World War II. This scarcity departs from the ubiquity of women in paintings and sculptures of the same period. In the fine arts, woman served to solidify the "Nazi myth" and its claim to the timeless time of an Aryan order simultaneously achieved and yet to come. Looking at poster art and using Ernst Bloch's notion of the nonsynchronous, this essay explores the extent to which women as signifiers of the modern – and thus as markers of time – threatened to expose the limits of this Nazi myth especially as the regime's war effort ground to its catastrophic end.

The image of woman as mother, muse, and sex object was a crucial component of National Socialist art under Hitler.These portrayals adorned Party buildings as sculpted reliefs, filled the annual Great German Art Exhibitions in painted form, and reached a mass audience through postcards and films.They helped to ensure the masculinist ethos of Nazism, reinforce social policy on gender roles, and extend state power into the private realm.A preeminent example of this imagery is Die vier Elemente (The Four Elements) painted by Adolf Ziegler. 1 The work was completed in 1936 and selected by Hitler himself to serve as the centerpiece of the first annual Great German Art Exhibition the following year.Ziegler was an architect of the Nazi cultural program and took a lead role in the systematic purge of modernist art from Germany.This purge was part of Hitler's larger campaign to eradicate the alleged formlessness and feminization of the despised Weimar era.With its chaste allegory of woman as earth, air, fire, and water, The Four Elements served as a painted manifesto of Germany's new, purified, and securely patriarchal cultural order.As Ziegler himself put it, his triptych visualized in clear and unequivocal terms the Nazi worldview and "its philosophical core: the affirmation of the laws of nature." 2 Given the apparent importance of woman and her image in Nazi propaganda, the virtual absence of women in German World War II poster art--arguably the most propagandistic of media--is all the more notable.This scarcity contrasts with the greater, indeed iconic presence of Rosie the Riveter, Ruby Loftus, and Mother Russia in American, British, and Soviet posters of the same period.Instead, those few German posters that do include women and appear from time to time in studies of the World War II era comprise a small and predictable repertoire of beatific mothers, Aryan goddesses, and Gretchens in Volkstrachten (traditional folk costume).The dearth of woman's image in German World War II poster art is the focus of this contribution to Contemporaneity.
The relative absence of women in Nazi posters points to an important, though visually repressed, presence of crisis in the regime's ideology.I argue in the following that attempts to contain woman's image exposed from the start fissures in the Nazi dream of a homogenous Volksgemeinshaft (people's community).
This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered in November 2007 at the Women in World War II conference organized by Helena Goscilo at the University of Pittsburgh and at the German Art and Culture since 1933 symposium organized by April Eisman at Iowa State University in October 2008.I thank the organizers and participants at these venues for their helpful responses to this analysis.
1 Illustrations of Ziegler's Four Elements and all other paintings and sculptures discussed in this essay can be found in the following sources: Berthold Hinz, Art in the Third Reich (original German edition 1974), trans.Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979); Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992); and Hans-Jörg Czech and Nikola Doll, eds.Kunst und Propaganda im  Streit der Nationen 1930-1945 (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2007 More importantly, and of greater interest to the editorial concerns of Contemporaneity, is the manner in which the depiction of women also intervened in the Ungleichzeitgkeit (nonsynchronism) of Nazi temporality.I borrow this notion of nonsynchronism from Ernst Bloch. 3 Bloch was an early and insightful observer of the Nazi attempt to incorporate different temporalities, or social modes of experiencing and living in time, into its peculiar and popularly persuasive brand of atavism and futurity.For him, Nazi ideology was defined through its effort to reconcile the rural and the urban and the traditional and the modern.The leadership's attempts at reconciliation ceaselessly confronted material and social contradictions that defined relations between these disparate modes of being in German society of the 1930s and 40s.
Bloch's notion of Ungleichzeitgkeit described the German state of affairs under Hitler, but it also, and more poignantly, played a prescriptive role in his revolutionary dialectic.He saw transformative potential in the material and social contradictions of a nonsynchronicity that might yet turn Germany's unfolding history in a progressive direction.His insistence on taking time seriously set his analysis apart from others on the Marxist left who continued to herald the working class as the historical agent of socialist revolution.They accordingly dismissed as anachronistic and politically inconsequential the interests of a rural peasantry and petite bourgeoisie seduced by Nazism's appeal to earlier social modes.Time and tragedy would prove this dismissal fatally flawed.
In time, Bloch too would see the hopefulness of his revolutionary dialectic extinguished in the ruins of Hitler's Third Reich.His concept of the nonsynchronous has nonetheless enjoyed an afterlife in more recent analyses of "the Nazi myth" as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy described the Hitler phenomenon in the 1980s. 4Most relevant here is Eric Michaud's Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, which built on Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's insights regarding the importance of art for the Nazi myth and its project of racist selfdefinition and "will to form." 5 For Michaud, this myth included an expressly temporal dimension intrinsic to a Nazi eschatology that heralded the Thousand-Year Reich as a salvation simultaneously achieved and yet to come. 6Continually resurfacing in this timeless time of Nazi myth, however, was the sign of woman and her uncontainable timeliness.In the following, I examine various permutations of woman's image in Nazi paintings, sculpture, and poster art.Through this survey, we shall see the manner in which women marked time in ways that troubled the seamless Gestalt of the Nazi myth.In conclusion, we will also consider the extent to which woman and her imaging in the Third Reich continue to trouble our understanding of the Nazi myth today.
For this study, I surveyed approximately six hundred German posters of the Second World War housed in the Hoover Institution at Stanford.7Only thirty-three contained images of women.Thirteen of these depicted female nurses in support of the Red Cross and mothers and children as part of fundraising drives for family charities.The remaining twenty were issued by the Propaganda Ministry or regional Party organizations to rally support for the war effort; a sampling of this latter group will be discussed in the following pages.
The relative absence of women in Nazi-era posters diverged sharply and programmatically from woman's pervasive presence in Weimar visual culture.Before Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933, woman, specifically in her guise as the New Woman, served as an icon of the Weimar Republic's accelerated tempo of modernization.Her image embodied the era's changing gender roles and its flourishing mass culture industry of advertising, film, fashion, and consumerism.Artists prominently featured the New Woman in Neue Sachlichkeit paintings.She also saturated Germany's 1920s mass-marketing poster and illustrated journal advertisements.Her streamlined silhouette of short-bobbed hair and sheath dresses rendered her ideally suited to the graphic precision of commercial propaganda.The New Woman thus announced modern subjectivity as mass media in the era of mechanical reproducibility.
Beginning in 1933, Hitler instituted a series of social changes that reversed Weimar's demographic trend toward women working outside the home.Nazi legislation redefined women within the domestic sphere and as propagators of the race through its marriage loan program.Meanwhile, policies that aimed to decrease the effects of economic depression returned men in greater numbers to the workforce.These measures were most successful among the middle and upper classes for whom wage concerns were less pressing than they were for peasants, workers, and others of the lower socio-economic rungs of German society.It was also among this middle and upper class demographic that the Reich's appeal to traditional gender roles had its greatest resonance. 8l painting in particular gave form to the Reich's new social order in the early years of the Nazi art program.These works frequently configured woman in traditional terms as the nurturing center of the Aryan family.Artists were exhorted to depict not one or two, but several children as part of any image devoted to German family life.Such directives vividly demonstrate the unabashed use of high art media in the Third Reich for overtly propagandistic purposes, in this case providing visual persuasion for Hitler's accelerated birthrate policies.9In these works, women appear in rural settings and engaged in a way of life safely removed from the corrosive taint of the New Woman's urban modernity.Paintings and sculpture, media in which woman's image became ubiquitous after 1933, also safely ensconced her in the sanctity of high art.Art thus helped to insulate women from the iniquity of the Weimar-era commercialism for which the New Woman's image had become the privileged sign.
Woman as the subject of Nazi high art also legitimated the proliferation of paintings and sculpture devoted to the time-honored theme of the female nude.Sepp Hilz and Ivo Saliger were among those painters who specialized in presenting woman according to the most stringent dictates of the Aryan ideal. 10Accordingly, their canvasses confront us with women who eschew makeup and the permanent wave hairstyles made fashionable at the time by Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and other film idols.Instead, Hilz and Saliger's women embody an ideal Aryan type with physiognomies composed of high foreheads, aquiline noses, and oblong faces.Also in compliance with the ideal, each woman appears with her long tresses of "natural" hair pulled into a tidy, braided bun at the back of the head.Moreover, their bodies are appropriately slender, but not skinny, and possessed of a glowing, healthy skin that pointedly distinguishes these Aryan women from the pale reediness of their New Woman predecessors.
Works on view in the Great German Art Exhibitions typically cloaked renderings of the female nude in the acceptable guise of Greek and Roman mythology.Artists also hewed closely to the Party line by adopting various modes of realism, including those that emulated the exacting character of photography, over and against the figural distortions of modernist art.Saliger's images in particular draw on the rhetoric of the photograph and its documentary claim to truth by employing flash-like illumination and a flat, stage-prop treatment of background landscape.His works portray Dianas and Venuses in settings with the rocks and trees of the out-of-doors.But his handling of cast shadows and use of artificial light signal that these settings are meant to be understood as existing within an interior, studio space.Moreover, Saliger's inclusion of pubic hair on the bodies of his nude goddesses recalls a similar pictorial strategy used by Ziegler ("the master of German pubic hair") in his iconic painting The Four Elements of 1936.This motif worked in concert with the classical iconography and photo naturalism of Ziegler and Saliger's images to naturalize the ideal Aryan body as true to nature.
True to the Nazi myth, it also rendered that body simultaneously contemporary and timeless.Such paintings thus took their coercive place in the Nazi biopolitical order by imaging Aryan perfection as a realizable ideal for women in the Third Reich.Within that order, these works also provided a visual rationale for Nazism's use of eugenics, mass sterilization, and murder in order to enact its project of racial purification and supremacy.
In his study of Art in the Third Reich (1974), Berthold Hinz identified the commencement of World War II as the moment when Nazi imagery began to reflect the regime's shift away from its earlier populist phase.After 1939, autocracy replaced populism and the leadership took to crass assertion of its prerogatives over the values of Christian bourgeois morality.
These values had been used by the regime to garner public support in its early years.Key for Hinz in this regard was the appearance of paintings in the Great German Art Exhibition of 1939 that departed from moralizing images of women as keepers of the hearth and home.
Instead, these works foregrounded woman's "sanctioned sexual domination" and her role as satiator of male fantasy. 11 Indeed, 1939 saw the unveiling of Paul Mathias Padua's startling interpretation of Leda and the Swan in the Great German Art Exhibition of that year.From the Renaissance onward, art works devoted to the mythic encounter between Zeus and Leda typically stressed the elements of courtship and love contained in the tale.Padua's rendering, by 10 See Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2004) for a thorough discussion of ever-changing and contradictory Nazi ideas on women and fashion."Hard-liners" within the leadership were nonetheless consistent in their efforts to "rescue" women from fashion by insisting on a cosmetic-free,"natural" look as most consonant with the Party's Blut und Boden ideology.Among other things, hard-liners also spearheaded attempts to battle the appeal of French couture among German women by (fruitlessly) extolling the virtues of Volkstrachten. between the SS and Aryan female civilians as a matter of patriotic duty.Himmler's dual goal was to maintain a high birth rate despite wartime restrictions and to further the master race.
Single women selected for Lebensborn duty were charged not only with breeding the Aryan elite; they were also to serve as unalloyed examples of the Blut und Boden ideal.
Accordingly, these women were prohibited from wearing lipstick, using fingernail polish, or plucking their eyebrows. 18e extent to which the art public was able to make connections between these policies and the images that confronted them from the walls of the Great German Art Exhibitions is unknown.However, some idea of viewer response can be gleaned from government security service reports on these annual shows.These reports, which began to be maintained in 1940, lend insight into public opinion that was otherwise silenced in the regime's highly regulated art press. 19In 1940, they document public demand for more works having to do with contemporary events, including war images and depictions of labor. 20In 1942, these reports also indicate a progressive decline in attendance at the yearly exhibitions particularly among workers and rural visitors.Their diminished presence was attributed to increasing travel and economic difficulties since the outbreak of the war. 21Meanwhile, the largely middle and upper class art public that still visited the annual shows registered its growing displeasure particularly with the number and character of the nudes on display.They also complained about the frequent dissemination of such images in the form of postcards.
M a r k i n g T i m e Schmitz-Wiedenbruck's Nation at War was among those works that resorted to chaste and maternal images of women in order to provide a continuing rationale for the increasingly desperate war effort.His canvas features a Madonna-like woman cradling a small child in her arms, who is seated at the center of the composition.Soldiers on the battlefront and laborers on the home front defensively encircle her as an emblem of a German hearth and home worth defending.Poster artists, by contrast, faced the challenge of reconfiguring woman's image in ways that rallied support for the war effort not only among men.As we shall now explore, events also required their propaganda works to solicit support from women whose labor outside the home was demanded with evermore urgency by the changing realities of war.
Two posters from the Hoover collection include images of women in propaganda related to the issue of territorial expansion and the political instrumentality of Germans beyond Germany's borders.One from the Augsburg branch of the Nazi Party depicts a woman of the Reich Labor Service (as indicated by her blue dress) marching in formation between two men, one dressed in military garb and the other as a farmer (Fig. 1). 23All three display squared jaws and straight backs that declare their resolute and militant support for "all Germans in the East."A large swastika flag hovers above and behind them, framing their unstoppable advance across a desolate plain.It descends from the heavens and anoints the marchers' forward advance with an unsubtle reference to the Party and the sanctity of its racially superior mission.
The second Hoover collection poster referring to German territorial expansion was produced in Munich sometime after 1939.In this instance, the artist deviated from our previous example in which woman was presented as a desexualized Party automaton.
Instead, woman appears more eroticized in the Munich poster, complete with heavily madeup eyes and painted lips (Fig. 2).Her blond, curled hair and clothes are dramatically windswept by the raging inferno behind her.A mother, she cradles a newborn in one arm while comforting a tearful young girl with the other.In this case, the artist combines the image of woman as mother with that of sexualized female victim.Such images took their place in an extensive propaganda campaign designed to rally men to the battlefront with stories of the murder and rape of German women and children by enemies of the expansionist Reich.Several additional posters surveyed for this essay come from the Propaganda Ministry's anti-espionage Shadowman campaign that began in 1943. 24In one image, a woman fashionably attired in an orange shirtwaist dress and turban drapes herself on the arm of an off-duty serviceman (Fig. 3).The two engage in an intimate conversation that is literally cast into darkness by the enlarged silhouette of hat-wearing man.The couple's shadowy encounter is thus rendered simultaneously illicit and potentially injurious to the nation.The poster encourages viewers to understand the threat as emanating not only from the eavesdropping specter who hovers nearby, but also from the flirtatious overtures of attractive young women who might seduce hapless servicemen into surrendering vital secrets.
Posters in the Shadowman campaign suggest that the women of most concern were those outside the regulatory constraints of the home and loose not only on the streets, but also within the workforce.Another image from this series depicts a telephone operator seated before a large and busy switchboard (Fig. 4). 25The operator turns genially in the direction of the shadowman whose dark silhouette falls on the wall behind her.Bright light from another source illuminates her smiling eyes, lips parted in speech, and the tight, regimented rows of her restrained, but fashionable permanent-wave hairstyle.Citing the need for chemicals, the Reich Minister for the Economy banned these hairstyles altogether in January 1943 only to lift the ban due to public complaint in March 1943.By then, however, few women--and certainly not your average switchboard operator--could afford them. 26With her "artificial" coiffure, the operator of the Shadowman campaign takes her place among the ranks of urban, white-collar working women beholden to frivolous, "unGerman" fashion.
Moreover, her feminine vulnerability risks not only her own security, but also that of the nation.Too trusting and chatty, her loose lips might indeed "sink ships." Female workers fared better in poster propaganda when they could be abstracted from the negative taint of the urban.In a Propaganda Ministry poster titled "You Also Help" from 1941, a female worker, a nurse, and a farmwoman stride happily along, arm in arm, over an undefined landscape (Fig. 5).Behind them, the slightest suggestion of factory structures (at left) and cattle (at right) indicate the actual context for the help they are called on to perform.A colossal head of a male soldier hovers above them, god-like, in the sky.His sober visage provides a stern counterpoint to the smiling faces and light, happy-go-lucky steps of the women below.Their work may be necessary, but the omniscient presence of male military prowess above guarantees that their efforts are a temporary lark that will end with the "inevitable" victory to come.
Several of the Hoover posters used woman's image to urge public contributions of used clothing and linens to help offset material shortages during the war. 27In one, a distinctly maternal woman, depicted with puffed sleeves and soft beneficence, carries a full armload of coats, shirts, and sweaters ready for donation (Fig. 6).This poster was produced in Berlin for a June 1942 clothing drive, shortly before the opening of the German offensive on 24 Czech and Doll, 353.See also Andreas Fleischer, "Feind hört mit!": Propagandakampagnen des Zweiten Weltkrieges im Vergleich (Münster, 1994). 25Her blue blouse indicates she is not one of the so-called gray mice, the name given to the thousands of gray uniformed women who were trained in communications after the war commenced.See Guenther, 126.
26 Ibid., 249-250.Stalingrad.After the Reich's resounding defeat in that conflict, the leadership was forced to pursue the total mobilization of women for the war effort.The military had been urging the conscription of women since 1940 in the face of failed attempts to exhort their voluntary help in alleviating critical labor shortages in war factories.On January 28, 1943, a compulsory work registration decree was finally enacted.Drafting women signaled a reversal of the social policies that had proved successful in garnering middle and upper class support for the regime in its first years.The leadership had long delayed this course of action, rightfully fearing popular disapproval. 28The fact that economically privileged women were still able to dodge service resulted in heightening growing class tensions. 29   After Stalingrad, poster artists faced the task of initiating women into Germany's new reality.The challenge was not only to rally the perennially suspect urban woman to the cause, but also to license her efforts within a male factory setting.In one solution, Fritz R.
Weber depicts a vigorous phalanx of men strapping on their helmets for battle in his poster titled "Harte Zeiten, Harte Pflichten, Harte Herzen" (Hard Times, Hard Duties, Hard Hearts) (Fig. 7).They join the charge behind a large swastika banner that flaps above their heads.
The composition as a whole is a slashing diagonal of outstretched arms, blowing flag, and striding legs that underscores the heightened drama of the moment when the men heed the call to defend the fatherland.They hand their wrenches and hammers to the crowd behind them in the knowledge that others will take up the work to be done in the factory, which appears in the background.Shown prominently in the foreground of the crowd are two women with their shirtsleeves rolled up and their strong arms and hands at the ready for the tools handed to them.Their identity as modern, urban women is present but understated with their fashionable permanent-wave hairstyles making a covert, but crucial appearance.
The blond curls of the woman at right are almost, but not entirely, obscured from view by the outstretched arm of the woman at left.And while a coil of brown hair peaks out from

Figure 1 "
Figure 1 "The NSDAP is the support of all Germans living in the east," undated.Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, GE 1052.
Figure 2 "Bavarian charity drive: ease the need of Germans living outside Germany!Help the pioneers of the German way of life!," 1939-45.Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, GE 235.
2 Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, "Die Frau in ihrem Element: Adolf Ziegler's Triptychon der Vol 2, No 1 (2012) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2012.43 of the human body in works that tended more toward the "unclothed" as opposed to the "nude."In1942,attendeesat the Great German Art Exhibition especially criticized paintings by Ziegler, Hilz, and Saliger for being "too naturalistic."22Publicopinionfavored works such as Josef Thorak's Two Humans, which security service reports recorded as one of the most popular works on view in the Great German Art Exhibition of 1941.Thorak's sculpture presents an idealized and traditional configuration of male protectiveness and female vulnerability.The male figure provides gentle support for his female counterpart, who balances on a canted surface as she extends her arms back and over her head to entwine him in a loving embrace.Two Humans thus presents a vision of gender relations based not on domination and "selection," but rather on shared desire and intimacy.A survey of catalogues from the Great German Art Exhibitions suggests that the more popularly acceptable portrayal of the nude evident in Thorak's Two Humans began to displace the crass configuration of woman as sex object that had made its way into earlier Great German Art Exhibitions.In the wake of Germany's defeat atStalingrad in 1942, Hans Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture http://contemporaneity.pitt.eduVol 2, No 1 (2012) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2012.43portrayal

27
Winterhilfswerk (winter relief work) came into being already in 1931 and was folded into the Nazi drive for autarky after 1933.It was designed to provide needy Germans with clothing and other supplies.See Guenther, 232.