Women and The Feminine in Third Reich Aesthetics: Analysis of NS-Frauen-Warte Magazines Selection for 1941

Abstract

In this article I analyze visual images in a set of German National Socialist women’s magazines NS-Frauen-Warte (10 issues for 1941). The central question of my research was whether the propaganda materials, whose target audience was German women, had a special "feminine aesthetics”, which at the level of the image would transmit the gender policy in the Third Reich. Based on the analysis of images and additional sources, I assume that the peculiarity of the "feminine aesthetics” in the Nazi official discourse is its original androcentrism. At the heart of the image of a "female”, which is associated with the "private” spaces, lies the image of a soldier. That is not obvious when we consider the iconography of the images of women, but reveals, if we look at the peculiarities of the internal organization of images of men and women. Androcentrism of German propaganda reveals the main features of the family policy and official discourse of the National Socialists, within which no special "female aesthetics” or aesthetics of the private sphere was formulated. Rather, this sphere appears in the shadow of the idea of a male, militarized heroic body as the main element of the entire ideological system.