| Kommentar |
The pedagogical value of this seminar is to make students think historically and critically. Thinking historically means gaining an understanding of how our world is largely determined by the socio-cultural context of our birth, and thinking critically means denaturalizing our assumption through encounters with ‘Other’ cultures and assumptions. The selected regimes, the former in more extreme forms than the latter, make us acutely aware of the ‘Othering’ thus offering an apt case for study.
The theoretical perspectives and analytical tools for the interdisciplinary comparison will be race, gender, class and nation in the ‘century of extremes’ and the aim will be to understand empowerment and marginalisation. The course will start with gender as a category of analysis and then complicate the picture by bringing in other analytical categories such as race, class, region, religion, culture, sexuality, generation and so on. This would enable us to work through the evidence, pose new questions and look for new sources to enrich our understanding and inspire further research and knowledge production. The historiographical survey, in addition, would take up polemical issues regarding gender construction, representation, roles and responsibilities, make the students aware of the perils of majoritarian politics and also go beyond the typical binaries of victim and perpetrator.
Apart from secondary sources, these issues will be approached through extracts from available archival source material. These will be discussed in class and compared with other sources, e.g. oral testimonies, diaries, films and literature to make the students appreciate and critically evaluate sources from a historical viewpoint. This would expose them to problems that historians encounter while interpreting data, and train them to assess the reliability of documents by examining their internal consistency, checking them against other kind of evidence and setting them in their historical context. At the same time students will be made aware of falsifications and mythologisation, manipulations and other distortions of the record by giving examples. |
| Literatur |
Lerke Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat, Töchter Fragen NS Frauengeschichte, Freiburg, 1990. Angelika Ebbinghaus (ed.), Opfer und Täterinnen. Frauenbiographien des Nationalsozialismus, Noerdlingen, 1987. Gisela Bock Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik, Opladen,1986. David F. Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society 1933-45, London, 1994. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics, New York, 1987. Parry Williams, Women in Twentieth Century Italy, Palgrave, 2010. Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, California University Press, 1992. |
