‘Neighbourhood Trivia’ and ‘Coffee Parties’: Hatred and Malice in the Totalitarian Nazi Regime

Abstract

The article talks about ordinary German women ‘s willing participation in the discriminatory mechanisms of the racial Nazi regime. It does so by exploring spaces within the patriarchal, sexist and racist power structures of the Nazi regime that ‘Aryan’ women appropriated by articulating and resolving their conflicts with Jewish citizens through acts of denunciation. An intensive treatment of the Gestapo case files of private individuals relating to the Jews visiblizes the so-far-little-talked-about ordinary female denouncers. The article demonstrates how they attempted to mould their ‘private’ lives to their deeply racialized surroundings by cleverly making use of the provision of denunciation, and how they participated in the fight against the ‘alien’ within the racial state. ‘Aryan’ women acted as self-appointed neighbourhood watchdogs of the racial community in hounding out Jewish citizens from their immediate surroundings.

Most importantly, the study places the informal power of housewives and mothers at the centre ofthe discourse on anti-Semitism. It argues that the ‘separate sphere’ did not just entail housekeeping, cooking and looking after the children, it also involved keeping a watch on a Jewish neighbour, cooking up malicious stories, eavesdropping, guarding his or her morality and sexuality. This activity required no formal gathering at the fixed place. Shop floors, house floors, doorsteps, staircases and bunkers provided space enough for this racial gossip to do rounds. Kaffeeklatsch (gossip around the coffee table) and Haustratsch (idle gossip with family members or neighbours) took anti-Semitic colour just as living rooms turned into venuesfor drafting letters ofdenunciation signed by groups of ‘disgruntled Aryan women’.