My first book, “Trash,” Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany (Cambridge, 2016), uncovers the long cultural and political roots of Nazi-era censorship in pre-WWI social reform movements and the family politics of the Weimar Republic.
By exploring small-town and regional encounters with early popular culture, the book demonstrates that local identity and Germany’s federal system played a key role in fostering negative responses to early movies and dime novels as well as inspiring grass-roots censorship campaigns. Shifting concepts of social welfare and a growing commitment to children’s rights to both an education and a sheltered childhood were crucial to making censorship possible, despite constitutional protections of individual rights and press freedoms in pre-WWI Germany. This study explains why the new Weimar constitution legalized censorship in 1919: anxieties about shifting gender norms and sexual mores led lawmakers to draft a constitution that prioritized social rights over individual rights and thereby opened the door to censorship. The two Weimar-era censorship laws, passed in 1920 and 1926, sparked an extensive and under-examined debate about morality that ultimately eroded national identity; the enforcement of these two laws acclimated Germans to censorship. In its entirety, the book uncovers the profound links between Weimar and Nazi censorship laws.
My current book project, Nazi Girl: Girls and Girlhood in Hitler’s Germany, examines girls and girlhood in the Third Reich, uses girls as an entry point to reexamine Nazi institutions, policies, and gender norms, and makes several scholarly and methodological contributions.
My principal goal in writing this book is to produce a comprehensive and deeply researched history of girls during the Third Reich. Girls went to school, worked, dated, had sex, consumed books and movies, joined Nazi youth groups, worked alongside POWs, and frequently confronted the choice of complying with laws and policies or violating them. And yet, most published histories of girls during this time period focus almost exclusively on the League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mädel, or BDM), the Hitler Youth’s female branch. These institutional histories are important and certainly easier to write since the sources are both more obvious and more limited (the regime deliberately destroyed organizational documents at war’s end), but they fail to capture the breadth and diversity of girls’ experiences. In many cases, they also ignore girls’ voices. And in the worst cases, they perpetuate the lies and rumors of Nazi publicists. As I started researching this broader history, I realized that this project also afforded an opportunity to rethink key aspects of the regime.
I have organized this book thematically, partly as a consequence of the archival record. Because Nazi officials and archivists concerned themselves mainly with girls who joined Nazi youth groups, I had to search creatively to find evidence of girls’ lives outside of these organizations. I consequently turned my attention to criminal police files, Gestapo records, social reformers files, ministerial documents, institutional reports, discussions about age of consent laws and abortion policies, labor policies, Hitler Youth directives, and scrapbooks and diaries. These sources yielded information more suitable for a thematic analysis rather than a chronological study. Nazi Girl consists of six chapters. I have written all six chapters and plan to complete the entire manuscript by September 2025.
While researching this current book, I stumbled upon the Hitler Youth’s 1937 “home building” (Heimbeschaffung). Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach announced this campaign on January 1, 1937, and the organization’s intent was to build thousands of new Hitler Youth meeting “homes” (Heime) throughout Germany and, starting in 1938, in the annexed territories. I was particularly interested in Nazi leaders’ repeated references to Article Two of the December 1936 Hitler Youth Law as they pressured municipalities to finance the construction of the new Hitler Youth homes. The more I researched, the more I suspected that Nazi leaders had adopted the Hitler Youth Law for two reasons: to increase membership and compel municipalities to shoulder these building costs. I subsequently published an article in Central Europe History in 2024 titled “For Want of Membership and Money: The 1936 Hitler Youth Law and the Hitler Youth’s Home Procurement Campaign.”