Joan Vollmer’s insightful take on Nazism in 1938
By Larissa Oliveira
If you clicked on this article, you probably already know who Joan Vollmer is. Here in this other blog post, you have a complete overview of her life. You should also know that, unlike the other Beat Generation women, there are neither poems nor novels by Joan, only her letters addressed to people like her confidants and writers Allen Ginsberg and Edie Parker. Through them, it is possible to perceive several nuances of the New Yorker, such as her sarcasm, her physical and mental health problems, and complaints about her husband William Burroughs, among other things. But they are also unique records about the artistic vein of a woman who contributed a lot to the existence of the Beat movement and who perhaps never published at the same time as men due to gender barriers, as when she spent most of her time on motherhood and dealing with Burroughs problems. Thus, these letters scale her story beyond that of the wife who was shot in the forehead. Joan leaves the place of object and gains her own narrative. However, we only have access to some of these pieces of documentation, and the few Beat films in which women play Joan, fail to place her according to what she was experiencing at the time when the Beat men built their experiences consolidated in their great works. Lo and behold, on women’s day last year, the Doane Stuart School, derived from the merger of two former all-girls schools, St. Agnes and Kenwood, posted the 1939 edition of the St. Agnes publication called Bleatings, on which Joan Vollmer collaborated as an editor. Joan had been dedicated to the magazine since 1936 and in her final year, she was awarded the school’s Gold Medal, an award given to the senior with the highest average of the year. Because of this, her classmates voted her the “Most Intellectual” that year. Furthermore, in the Bleatings yearbook, she chooses the classical musician Beethoven as her “weakness” and her hands as her “best feature”, and ends the section with her ambition: “to live in New York City”. Which she ended up doing. These new pieces of information about Joan are unprecedented as little is known about her pre-Barnard life and relationship with William. According to Betty Friedan’s 1963’s The Feminine Mystique, an important second-wave feminist work that analyzes the types of women forged at different times in the United States, women in the late 1930s were more concerned with human rights and freedom of other peoples and races, such as the victims of Nazism than their own since feminism was considered a thing of the past as the female vote had been guaranteed and the movement was deemed as no longer needed. The woman of that era also read mass magazines like the Lady’s Home Journal that published fictional stories about the new independent, adventurous, but still romantic woman seeking approval from her partner — I recommend seeing the films of actresses like Bette Davis and Marlene Dietrich of the time. Not that Joan read these magazines, but she was a woman of her time as she found more freedom with new women’s achievements such as women’s suffrage and the opening of the job market to women, albeit under precarious conditions in the midst of the Great Depression, and which highly disadvantaged women of color. Joan would go on to win a journalism scholarship at the renowned Barnard College in New York City. Despite having married and having a child in the first half of the 1940s, she would file for divorce and adopt a lifestyle different from the standard expected of women who welcomed back their husbands in the post-war period and who had to leave the job market to dedicate themselves to domestic life. Now going back to the 1930s, it is possible to say that Joan’s transgressive character had already been stimulated when she decides to write about something real and pertinent to her time: Nazi Germany. Her piece is relevant because women were not expected to talk about politics, wars, or other ‘masculine’ issues. The new independent woman lived with fantasies of adventures that would not jeopardize men. I remember when I went to high school, in 2010, and I dwelled on the history of the Second World War buying magazines and books and getting high grades, which was perceived with suspicion by male classmates as if I had even cheated on the test. Just imagine how it was for a teen girl to write about nazism in 1938 when World War II had not yet begun — Joan wrote her article in 1938 and it was published in the fall of 1939, the same season the War began.
Vollmer’s article was written in French, which indicates another trait of her intellectuality in weaving critical content in a second language. The theme of the magazine’s edition was patriotism and how it should exist in nations, an issue still relevant to this day. Joan addressed the risks of patriotism based on the German Reich. She traces a history of one of the most important symbols of patriotism, the national anthem, which was consolidated in several nations, in a positive way, as when a song comes from the oppressed class as it was in the French Revolution, and negatively when it is used as a tool that alienates people, used by oppressive governments, such as Hitler’s. Joan goes further and hints that first of all, hymns are songs and that they have enormous power to mobilize a population, and we should not underestimate them, as they can, for example, reach all corners of the world. Just remember how the Nazi anthem was adapted by various authoritarian regimes like Franco’s in Spain. It is very interesting how Joan managed in a small article, of less than two pages, to present several points about the power of music in the course of humanity and how at that moment it had a devastating effect. Joan was therefore a woman of her time in fighting Nazism and its most effective weapon that resonates to this day. It would have been amazing if she could have pursued the journalistic field after college and written more chronicles. This publication of hers is valuable as it removes Joan from the footnote of the Beat Generation and places her as an active writer who also condemned the political issues of her time, in her teen years.
I want to thank the Doane Stuart school so much for kindly granting me access to Joan Vollmer’s archive.
Here is Joan Vollmer’s article in full:
The French corner
The National Anthems
When we think of the great events of history, we must think of the music — the marches and hymns — that mobilize people. Perhaps the classic example of this is the anthem of the French Revolution, La Marseillaise. That was the battle cry of the workers. After the Revolution, La Marseillaise continued as the national anthem of France.
During the American Revolution, the anthem whose melody made the soldiers march was Yankee Doodle. This anthem was composed by soldiers from England to satirize the crass ways of soldiers from North America. They ended up adopting this satire as their victory anthem.
England went to war many times to the tune of British Grenadiers. L’internationale, the anthem of the Russian Revolution, became the ballad of communists of all nations.
Modern Germany has Horst Wessel Lied, but the psyche of the Nazis’ fascist ideology is revealed in the music of Richard Wagner. It is no coincidence that this music is Hitler’s favorite. When Hitler came to power, the orchestra played La Course des Valkyries. This song, with its almost hysterical heroism and its theatrical and pretentious grandeur, represents, in a symbolic way, the spirit of the Führer. Music can also be as erudite as Siegfrieds Rheinreise, or as banal as Over There — if it enters the public imagination, it can have a great effect on the progress or deterioration of humanity.
Translated from French to English by the author of this post, Larissa Oliveira.
You can find this article in Portuguese here.
Sources:
https://www.doanestuart.org/the-women-of-st-agnes-speak-out-in-1938/
https://www.doanestuart.org/the-doane-stuart-schools-beat-generation-connection/
Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique. Norton & Co.
