Sweeping the German Nation
Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870-1945
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:9th Oct '06
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£39.99(9780521744157)
German housekeepers have an international reputation characterized by thrift, order, and extreme cleanliness. But where did this stereotype come from, and what is its history? This book explores how Germans defined and developed a particular style of domesticity in the late nineteenth century, and how it became crucial to German national identity.Is cleanliness next to Germanness, as some nineteenth-century nationalists insisted? This book explores the relationship between gender roles, domesticity, and German national identity between 1870–1945. After German unification, approaches to household management that had originally emerged among the bourgeoisie became central to German national identity by 1914. Thrift, order, and extreme cleanliness, along with particular domestic markers (such as the linen cabinet) and holiday customs, were used by many Germans to define the distinctions between themselves and neighboring cultures. What was bourgeois at home became German abroad, as 'German domesticity' also helped to define and underwrite colonial identities in Southwest Africa and elsewhere. After 1933, this idealized notion of domestic Germanness was racialized and incorporated into an array of Nazi social politics. In occupied Eastern Europe during WWII Nazi women's groups used these approaches to household management in their attempts to 'Germanize' Eastern European women who were part of a large-scale project of population resettlement and ethnic cleansing.
'In this absorbing and informative book, the author analyzes the development of an understanding of domesticity that linked alleged qualities of housework, a private activity, to Germanness, a pubic identity.' The Historian
ISBN: 9780521841139
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 19mm
Weight: 560g
264 pages