Nazism As Fascism by Eley Geoff;

Author:Eley, Geoff;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

To some extent, the outcome of this conflict followed practical lines. The DAF strategy, which targeted women in the workplace, was realized best in small and medium-sized firms with a mainly female labor force, producing a total of some 3,000 workplace-recruited social workers by 1943. In the bigger companies, in contrast, where numbers of women workers (as in mining and other parts of heavy industry) were often very low, management could resist the DAF with greater success: as the social work efforts would be forced outside the factory gates, a company such as Siemens could claim that its provision was already very good, and the claims of the DAF to competence could be more effectively fought.

In all of these ways the case of Siemens seems excellently suited for a post-Foucauldian analysis. In its several variants, factory-based social work clearly offered a site for the deployment of norms and values increasingly postulated for the family across a spectrum of the new human sciences by different schools of psychologists, in particular. Families were being “policed” in the sense intended by Jacques Donzelot – that is, precisely not via the coercive imposition of conformity using the threat of penalties or reprisals (unless, of course, the women concerned should transgress some other part of the Third Reich’s penal code).84 Rather, the normality envisaged by the new expertise would be secured by producing mothers who themselves would actively desire hygienic homes, well-ordered households, and healthy, efficiently nourished children. In the Siemens conception, the familial ideal could succeed only “to the extent that it managed to solicit the active engagement of individuals in the promotion of their own bodily efficiency.”85 The Siemens experts sought to implant in their family subjects a set of expectations about the character of a successful domestic sphere, images that were likewise always keyed to perceptions of reward. Such families were encouraged “to govern their intimate relations and socialize their children according to social norms,” but their means of doing so involved self-monitoring and self-activation based on cultivating “their own hopes and fears.” Women should become the technicians of their own familial competence: “Parental conduct, motherhood, and child rearing can thus be regulated through family autonomy, through wishes and aspirations, and through the activation of individual guilt, personal anxiety, and private disappointment.”86

Yet, in the actual day-to-dayness of their working and family lives, the Siemens women, whether workers themselves or workers’ wives, encountered far more than the Siemens managers, social workers, industrial psychologists, testers, and psychotechnicians alone. They also dealt with neighbors, friends, workmates, other family members, and the often relentless attentions of the various agencies of the Nazi state, including those of the organization with its own interest in molding the working environment – namely, the DAF. Ordinary life is never without its various forms of rockiness even under the most stable and harmonious of political conditions, after all, whether these come from social problems, marital or parental crises, neighborhood tensions, or the sheer arduousness of balancing work and home. Beneath the

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