In German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust: Complicity and Gender in the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, March 2019), German professor Elisabeth Krimmer looks at how women's diaries, fiction, memoirs and other writing gives an insight into the complicit bystanders' role in the functioning of the Nazi regime. Chapters on army auxiliaries, nurses, female refugees, rape victims and Holocaust survivors analyze women's motivations for enlisting in the National Socialist cause, as well as for their continuing support for the regime and, in some cases, their growing estrangement from it. 

Professor Krimmer works mainly on the culture and representation of war in German literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, but has wide-ranging secondary projects, including gender studies and film. Her bibliography includes 8 books and numerous articles. Professor Krimmer was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship in 2007 and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship in 2014. In 2008, she was selected as one of four Chancellor’s Fellows campus-wide for a five-year term.

Krimmer’s first book, In the Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women around 1800 (Wayne State Univ. Press, 2004) analyzes constructions of gender, body and identity in German literature and culture around 1800. Her second book, The Representation of War in German Literature from 1800 to the Present (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010) investigates the aesthetic, theoretical, and historical challenges that confront writers of war. Most recently, Professor Krimmer co-edited a volume on warfare in eighteenth-century literature and culture. She has also co-authored two books on Hollywood film entitled Hollywood Divas, Indie Queens and TV Heroines: Contemporary Screen Images of Women (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) and Hollywood Masculinities: Gender, Genre, and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). She is currently working on a book on German women and war.

Krimmer’s articles have appeared in venues such as PMLA, The German Quarterly, Seminar, German Life, and Letters and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her article on castrati in German literature and culture around 1800 was awarded the essay prize of the Goethe Society of North America, and her article on warfare and gender in Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht and Penthesilea received the Max Kade essay prize for best article in The German Quarterly. She also received a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award for Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities. 

View the book at Cambridge University Press