I am not sure if I have ever discussed this on here before, but my intended course of post-bachelor studies is graduate studies in European gender history/history of sexuality (MA and then, hopefully, PhD). I plan on focusing on constructions of gender (emphasis on masculinity) and conceptions of sexuality in in the Third Reich.

And sometimes I wonder why I have chosen a topic that has the power to make me weep and tremble and rage.

And then, I read something like this:

(from an interview of a Jewish-French resistance fighter interned at Auschwitz in 1944; in reference to the actions of her fellow female inmates when she took ill on her birthday)


"They didn't send me to the camp hospital. Alma feared that I would be gassed. During the night I thought to myself, nobody cares about me in the entire world. I am so ill and so alone and nobody even cares that I exist. And suddenly, the girls came to me in thier night shirts, they brought me presents and gave me bread, bread was so important to me. The girls start to sing, my resistance songs. Such an experience only happens once in a lifetime. To this day I still feel very strange when I think of this wonderful solidarity."
- Fania Fenelon, interviewed in Die Zeit, 3 October 1980, p. 64.

It is these glimpses of sheer, unadulterated humanity that drive me to study this time period.

They renew my faith and spirit, and bring with them the kind of tears that remind us how beautiful life truly is; how beautiful we all are.

I don't care if this is an un-academic justification.

It's mine and I'm not afraid to own it.