Donne interrotte dalla Germania nazista

75 years after the Liberation of Auschwitz the essay presents critical reflections drawing on Adorno’s answer to “Was ist Deutsch” in order to discuss and introduce to the book “Destini di donne nella Germania nazionalsocialista” (2020) by Vincenzo De Lucia. The book collects unpublished testimonies of German women leading simple existences, made of daily work. Most of them were condemned in and by Nazi Germany only because they offered help and support to Polish, French, Italian forced labourers. They were sent to concentration or death camps, forced to prostitution or exposed to public ridicule in the villages, where they lived. Neither pasionarias of the Resistance nor rubble women, they generally lived in rural areas, on the borders with France, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The essay investigates how such marginal realities help highlighting the fate of Goethe's Gretchen (Faust) and of Celan's Margarete (Death Fugue) thus tracing the destiny of women who in German literature were sung for golden hair or just because they fell in love with the male hero. As if the historical events collected in “Destini di donne nella Germania nazionalsocialista” could finally return to the reader those personalities hidden behind golden hair and give the word to the Female Element capable of welcoming life in all its forms and which, precisely for this reason, had to pay a very high price in Nazi Germany. The essay is intended to throw a bridge towards our actual realities of Europeans with the uprising of youth activists guided by Greta Thunberg promoting a new culture of diversity as well as respectful use and preservation of nature. The Female Element pays particular attention to what Hans Jonas calls “the outcry of mute things”.