Reframing Antifascism: Genre, Memory and the Life Writings of Greta Kuckhoff

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Greta Kuckhoff was a member of an anti-Nazi resistance group, 'The Red Orchestra'. She was condemned to death in 1943, but although her husband and many of her friends were executed, her sentence was commuted and she was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. This project tells the story of her work to commemorate the resisters in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and German Democratic Republic through a policy of 'everyday antifascism'. By tracing the different genres of her recorded memories, from radio broadcasts, to letters, journal articles, film, exhibitions, memoir, and autobiography, this study intervenes in the current contentious debates about remembering antifascism and the past of East Germany. Based on previously unpublished archival sources, the monograph contributes to a cultural history of antifascism and refutes dominant discourse about the absence of commemoration of the Holocaust in the GDR. The monograph highlights the gendered politics of remembering anti-Nazi resistance, both within the GDR and after unification, and in doing so draws renewed attention to the possibilities of political subjectivities and policies of commemoration built on an active antifascist consensus.