Gender and the Radical and Extreme Right

Mechanisms of Transmission and the Role of Educational Interventions

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hilary Pilkington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138335684
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429812699
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Gender and the Radical and Extreme Right takes up an important and often-overlooked across scholarship on the radical right, gender, and education. These subfields have mostly operated independent of one another, and the scholars and practitioners who attend to educational interventions on the far right rarely address gender directly, while the growing body of scholarship on gender and the far right typically overlooks the issue of educational implications.

This edited volume steps into this space, bringing together seven chapters and an afterword to help readers rethink the educational implications of research on gender and the radical right. As a starting point for future dialogue and research across previously disparate subfields, this volume highlights education as one space where such an integration may be seen as a fruitful avenue for further exploration.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.

Towards equality for women and men of one race: Sophie Rogge-Börner's racial-feminist philosophy of education

Jennifer Meyer

ABSTRACT

Since 1933 marked the end of autonomous and democratic women’s associations, historiography tends to neglect the study of feminist voices under National-Socialism. This paper looks at one of völkisch feminist movement’s leaders, writer and journalist Sophie Rogge-Börner (1878–1955), whose claims for gender equality were rooted in anti-Semitism and scientific racism. In its first section, the paper will present the core aspects of her racial-feminist discourse. The second section will discuss Sophie Rogge-Börner’s philosophy of education in detail to compare her conceptions to the official national-socialist ideology. By doing so, this paper will address the issue of women’s engagement, agency, and autonomy in the radical right.

Women and men of one race are blessed with the same intellectual capacities (…). This is why both sexes have the right to the same education of the mind.(Sophie Rogge-Börner,1933c,174).

Introduction

From the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to the Historikerinnenstreit in the early 1980s, feminist interpretations of the Nazi past tended to portray all women as victims of the sexist and racist politics of the Third Reich, and to describe the National-Socialist ideology as the most extreme form of patriarchy.¹ This was consistent with a perception of radical right movements as male-dominated and deeply misogynistic, which has been challenged by recent historiography (Evans 1986; Grossmann 1991). In the past decades, these ideal-typical representations have been abandoned in favour of more nuanced and complex descriptions of the variety of women’s experiences under the Third Reich, shaped in particular by their ‘racial’ and social origin, as well as their support for and participation in radical right movements (Heinsohn, Vogel and Weckel 1997; Gehmacher 1998, 2001; Kandel 2004; Allal 2006). Nowadays, the main question is not whether, but to what extent, for what reasons, and at what levels women were involved in the radical right. As a result, it is to be asked whether the presence of women in radical right movements challenges their defence of traditional gender roles, heterosexuality, and patriarchal values.

Driven by these questions, this article takes a look at the German-völkisch women’s movement, which emerged in the 1920s as a reaction to the democratic and (partially) internationalist impetus of the ‘old’ women’s movement, and to the strong anti-feminism within the radical right. Historiography generally distinguishes two modes of argumentation within first-wave feminism: difference (or relational) feminists praise genuinely feminine qualities and seek the recognition of women’s specific contributions to society; equality (or individualist) feminists advocate for women’s full emancipation as a universal human right. In both cases, however, gender appears to be the main category of feminist analysis and politics. This paper proposes to challenge this gender-centred perspective in adoptinganintersectionalapproach(Kallenberg,MuellerandMeyer,2013)toexaminethe interlocking of the categories of race,class,and gender in the writings of völkisch journalist and writer Sophie Rogge-Börner. Although she did not manage to persuade the majority of völkisch women to accept herradical conception of gender equality,and faced a violent anti-feminist backlash from all streams of the radical right, she can be considered one of the völkisch women’s movement leaders (Crips 1990; Ziege 1997; Streubel 2006; Breuer 2008; Meyer 2013). As the first child of Prussian officer Eduard Börner (1852–1921) and Pauline Scharpenberg (1855–1921), she was born on 24 July 1878 in Warendorf in Westphalia but lived in various garrison towns, following the regular transfers of her father. At almost thirty-two years old, she married military doctor Max Rogge (1871–1946) in April 1910 with whom she had a son, Ralf, a year later.² Like for many German women, the war and Germany’s defeat woke her interest in politics (Heinsohn 2000, 2007). She joined the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German-National People’s Party) in 1919, which supported the restoration of the monarchy, and she campaigned for Germany’s ‘racial’ renewal. Disappointed by the party’s conservatism and anti-feminism, she played an active role in the openly racist and anti-Semitic Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei (German-Völkisch Freedom Party) and the Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung (National-Socialist Freedom Movement) but avoided an affiliation with the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National-Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP).³ Encouraging the alliance between all parties and groups of the radical right, she gathered local national-socialist and völkisch supporters under the name Völkisch-sozialer Block (Völkisch-Social Bloc) for the 1924 parliamentary election. After a brief career as a teacher before the First World War, she focused on writing and published many fictional novels and short stories, poems, and political essays. Furthermore, she worked as a journalist and was the chief editor of Die Deutsche Kämpferin. Stimmen zur Gestaltung der wahrhaftigen Volks-gemeinschaft, literally: The German (female) fighter. Voices for the shaping of a true community of the people,from 1933 to 1937.On an average,the magazine reached a circulation of 2500 exemplars per month. In comparison, Die Frau, the bimonthly organ of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (Federation of German Women’s Associations) did not exceed a circulation of 8000 exemplars.

As a very prolific journalist and writer, Sophie Rogge-Börner gained a certain popularity in the 1920s but she never succeed in convincing the völkisch movement to convert to feminism, nor völkisch feminists to equality feminism. As both a radical advocate of full gender equality and a virulent anti-Semitic, she also failed at assembling non-völkisch women under the banner of her racial-feminist project. Her ongoing conflict with the national-socialist regime regarding its women’s policy marginalised her even more in the political arena. After 1945, she did not regain her former popularity even if she tried to reconnect with völkisch ideologues and especially with feminists.Published in 1951,her last book Planet im Absturz? may give the impression that she focused solely on her feminist project.However,an in-depth analysis and an insight into her private correspondence with former colleague and friend Lenore Kühn reveal quickly that she was forced to reformulate her racial views to avoid censorship but did not abandon them. In her eyes, the only crimes one could condemn Hitler and the Third Reich for were their sexism and the death of German soldiers and civilians.She was very careful to not fully deny the Holocaust but never named its main victims,the Jews,and stated outright that the expulsion of Germans from the Eastern European countries decided during the Potsdam Conference was in no way less inhuman or less cruel (Rogge-Börner 1951, 13). This equivalence echoed to the development of the ‘victim theory’ – or ‘victim myth’ – that founded Austria’s national identity after 1945 but also granted a sort of moral amnesty to a large part of the German population. The designation of Adolf Hitler and the national-socialist elites as the real and sole perpetrators led to a victimisation of individuals that tended to present the Germans as the victims of Hitler’s power of manipulation and of his insatiable militarism and imperialism, the victims of the Allied Forces, and the victims of the expulsions after the war, and to restrict the collective examination of the various forms of complicity that took place. Two letters addressed to Lenore Kühn in 1951 and 1952 reveal that Sophie Rogge-Börner was still in contact with her long-time friend and colleague Bernhard Kummer, a fellow representative of Nordicism, but was unable to propagate feminist ideas within neo-völkisch and right-wing circles. She was also rather disappointed by the pacifist, internationalist, and democratic stance of the majority of the newly founded feminist associations, such as the Deutscher Frauenring (German women’s circle, 1949), and refused to cooperate with them. However, she also had a few occasional successes, for example, when a few activists from Berlin invited her in 1952 to read one of her new plays. Three years later, in February 1955, Sophie Rogge-Börner died and was buried in Düsseldorf where she had lived since October 1948. Although Sophie Rogge-Börner remained a controversial and marginalised figure within the radical right, from 1933 onwards,her ideas experienced a new conceptual development and a surge of interest in pagan Unitarian circles through the work of philosopher and Ludwig F. Clauss’s scholar Sigrid Hunke (1913–1999), a scholar of Ludwig F. Clauss (Junginger 2004).

In its first section,this article will expose the three key aspects of Sophie Rogge-Börner’s racial-feminism: (1) the construction of the myth of the Nordic-Germanic race’s original and total gender equality, (2) the narrative of ‘racial degeneration’, allegedly provoked by the introduction of ‘Jewish’ patriarchy, and (3) the presentation of the re-establishment of gender equality as the solution of the ‘race question’. In its second section, this article will focus on the link between education and the radical right in taking a closer look at Sophie Rogge-Börner’s claims for gender-equal and gender-neutral education.

The racial-feminist thought as the symbiosis of racial anti-Semitism and equality feminism

The myth of the Nordic-Germanic race's original and total gender equality

Like the majority of twentieth-century racial theorists, Sophie Rogge-Börner referred to popular and widely manipulated texts such as Tacitus’ Germania, Johann J. Bachofen’s Mother Right, and stories of the Norse mythology compiled in the Edda and the sagas, which allegedly proved the racial superiority of the Germans (Laffont 2006; Davies 2007, 2009; Baden 2009). However, her feminist interpretation of these knowledge sources remained profoundly controversial within the radical right, as well as within the various strands of the feminist movement. Claiming that the specific power relation between men and women was the primary criterion to not only delimit the frontiers between the various races, but also to determine their ranking in the global racial hierarchy, she asserted that peoples of the so-called ‘Nordic-Germanic race’in ancient times were characterised by gender equality when they remained racially pure; conversely, patriarchy and the most brutal oppression of women reigned within the inferior ‘Jewish race’. Sophie Rogge-Börner’s focus on the social organisation, rather than on biological elements, in her definition of the Nordic-Germanic ‘race’ finds an explanation in her adhesion to Nordicism’s minority ‘racial psychologist’stream. Literally the ‘science of the race’s soul’(Rassen-seelenkunde), racial psychology was developed by Ludwig F. Clauss as a reaction to Hans F. K. Günther’s ‘raciology’ (Rassenkunde). It postulated that cultural and psychological aspects were of higher importance than purely biological elements to define a ‘race’ (Wiedemann 2009).

According to Sophie Rogge-Börner, Nordic-Germanic gender equality would have resulted from minimal sexual differentiation.Primary sex characteristics(external genitalia, internal reproductive anatomy, and gonads) were the only distinction between male and female humans of Nordic-Germanic ‘race’ based on physiological characteristics that she did not challenge since they were necessary to human reproduction. However, she considered that they had no social relevance and therefore did not generate an imbalance of power distribution between men and women, nor sexism. She also affirmed that secondary sex characteristics, like stature or strength, did not exist within the Nordic-Germanic ‘race’ at the beginning of humanity, but were rather a long-term result of the introduction of so-called ‘Jewish’ patriarchy. Likewise, during this ‘pure’ period of time, sex-specific differences in brain structure were inexistent, so that intellectual capacities and psychology could differ between individuals but were not caused by their gender. The similarity between genders, or rather the absence of a sex-specific differentiation, was the key to gender equality.

Although she adopted an essentialist conception of the category of ‘race’, Sophie Rogge-Börner rejected the feminist arguments based on a differentialist definition of gender, which emphasised specifically feminine qualities and aimed at extending the so-called female sphere rather than achieving full equality in all domains. Affirming that the whole Nordic-Germanic social organisation was built on the principle of ‘not taking gender difference into consideration’ (Rogge-Börner 1935, 7–24), as well on a strongly defined elitism between an ‘elite’ and a broader ‘mass’, she stated that Nordic-Germanic women had the same right as men to work, to contribute to the political and legislative process, to administer justice, to perform religious functions, and to participate in armed battles against enemies.

Although Sophie Rogge-Börner referred to both Ludwig F. Clauss and Hans F. K. Günther in her early works, certainly to gain respectability and legitimacy as a scholar of scientific racism, she stridently criticised their strong anti-feminism, particularly Hans F.K.Günther’s engagement in the Männerbund(Men’sLeague)a long with Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg and their assertion that patriarchy was of Nordic essence and,as a result,the sole authentic and appropriate social system for peoples...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction - In search of the missing link: gender, education and the radical right
• 1. Towards equality for women and men of one race: Sophie Rogge-Borner's raciai-feminist philosophy of education
• 2. The'obnoxious mobilised minority': homophobia and homohysteria in the British national party, 1982-1999
• 3. Female leaders in a radical right movement: the Latvian National Front
• 4. Soldier, sailor, rebel, rule-breaker: masculinity and the body in the German far right
• 5. 'Sexually modern nativist voters': do they exist and do they vote for the populist radical right?
• 6. 'EDL angels stand beside their men ... not behind them': the politics of gender and sexuality in an anti-lslam(ist) movement
• 7. Women and Golden Dawn: reproducing the nationalist habitus
• Afterword: next steps in the study of gender and education in the radical right
• Index