There’s a fascinating argument going on in Germany right now. It digs at one of modern Germany’s founding myths.
In one corner is the historian Leonie Treber of the University of Duisburg-Essen, so my neck of the woods. Her dissertation just appeared as a book called The Myth of the Rubble Women (Mythos Trümmerfrauen).
In the other corner is, well, most people who actually lived in the immediate postwar years and care to comment in the media about Treber’s book.
As I wrote in a post last year on postwar Germany’s iconic women, the Trümmerfrau 
is the heroine of the country’s rise from the ruins. Treber argues this is a legend that evolved in the Sixties and Seventies in West Germany (earlier in East Germany).
She analyzed government documents related to reconstruction in 11 German cities and concluded the women generally didn’t stack bricks or push rubble on carts. Most of the work was done by removal and construction companies. In the immediate postwar years, she says, there was no term “Trümmerfrau,” and only in Berlin and cities in the Soviet Zone did women do significant amounts of work in the ruins.
When I first heard about this, I thought, “Uh-oh.” Treber is tarnishing one of the beloved images of post-Nazi Germany.
Modern West Germany needed to reinvent its history, create its own founding myths. Every country does it. The “rise from the ashes” story needed its heroes at a time when there were very few to go around. Postwar Germany in the late Forties and into the Fifties was in many areas still clearly in the hands of ex-Nazis. The men wouldn’t be the image of the new Germany. The women who got on with it while the men were imprisoned, broken or dead — they kept society together.
And that’s where myth and memory clash with data. My local paper the NRZ published excerpts of some of the mostly infuriated letters-to-the-editor that arrived after the paper reported on Treber’s book.”The suffering of these women isn’t even appreciated,” one said. Another didn’t hold back: “What is this silly goose thinking when she defames the proven achievements of the Trümmerfrauen?”
Some letters insisted they used the term Trümmerfrau as early as the Fifties here in western Germany. They pointed out that not only did their mothers carry bricks, so did the children (and some men, of course). It wasn’t a matter of rebuilding whole city blocks, it was about the family home, the shop, the school. People rebuilt their own neighborhoods brick by brick. The private stories have poured in, and if you know German, you can read some on the WAZ (NRZ) newspaper group site here.
Treber’s book has gotten some attention for its controversy, and it’s fun to watch. My opinion? A good story is sometimes “truer” than the facts. It isn’t important to measure the achievements of these women in cubic meters of rubble. Postwar German women were the first to pick up the pieces — because they had to. For that, they deserve a place in Germany’s founding story.
Photo:Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-Z1218-316 / Kolbe / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-Z1218-316%2C_Tr%C3%BCmmerfrauen_bei_der_Arbeit.jpg
Postwar Germany 
You are missing the point–deliberately it seems, and in a way that amounts to your own tendency to propagandize. It tracks Ms. Treber’s desire to make a career herself saying things that will get noticed for academic profit.
As the “old nazis” die out, new ways have to be found to vilify Germany. We’re all aware of that. But Ms. Treber in my view is taking a cheap shot at her own people to raise the value of her personal brand.
The point isn’t that all rubble was cleared by women.
The point is that after experiencing such hell–devastation of their homes, families, culture, selves, and genome, there were German women in the cities who went out and did what needed to be done in exactly, precisely this way.
They didn’t sit in the rubble and beg for help and whine. They didn’t play the victim drama for the UN. They got up and did what needed to be done.
And that–SPECIFICALLY THAT–is a prized element of German self image.
You can argue that not all women did it, or not all rubble was cleared this way. You want to join Ms. Treber in understanding the truths that images can convey. You want to join her in robbing the German people of the right to have a positive self image.
You are talking in this instance about women who suffered orchestrated campaigns of mass rape in East Germany AFTER all the bombing was over.
You are talking about women who lost everything that can be lost…everything but their own lives.
When is the last time YOU cleared building rubble after a catastrophic urban loss? I won’t ask when is the last time you lost everything in a hellstorm at the hands of powerful warring nations; already know the answer to that.
Do you think Ms. Treber ever has?
What does she know about these women, or depiction of them, other than a place to make an argument to advance her career? (And new varieties of dissing the German people are always lucrative, with the multiculturalist self-hating guilt-type especially so.)
I know of no one of my family who served in the Army in the ETO who claims women did it all in Germany. Some of them worked in postwar rebuilding.
What they did claim was that there was a strength in German women that they saw nowhere else except among the Finnish women of the same era, and many American women (like my mother and aunts) on the home front. What they did claim was that wherever there were options to bounce back, these women were on the forefront of pulling their society back together. What they said was that, to see one of these women cry affected them more powerfully than seeing a thousand of them dead, because in my uncle’s words, “The good Frau did not cry over trifles.”
I doubt you are of an age that you ever knew any of these people yourself. So you work from images and abstractions and discourses and all the shadowy features of that. I guess that’s to be expected. But your words are part of a massive drive to continually and perpetually rob the German people of a sense of self as a distinct group of people with a distinct evolutionary history.
I have no horses in this race. I am not German. But I do recognize propaganda when I see it.
You might benefit from reading the American cultural critic Steve Sailer on this entire phenomenon.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-nyt-warns-of-the-impending-nazi-shortage/
Thank you very much for your note. I hope you read my post again, because we seem to agree on many more points related to postwar women than you give credit for.
Another great article, thanks for sharing it wit us.
Glad you liked it!
Absolutely fascinating! Another terrific post, Anika.
My father spent over two years doing nothing but removing rubble and rebuilding essential structures after his release from an American POW camp in August of 1945. This despite the fact that he was an academic, and lacked any construction skills. Everybody in the country who was able pitched-in; they had to rebuild the massive destruction from the war before any semblance of “regular life” could resume. While there may well have been professional contracting firms involved in the cleanup, the sheer scope of the job required that everyone who could pitch-in did so. My Dad worked side-by-side with women, children, and retirees. He vividly described the strange feeling of being among the few, able-bodied men participating. He described the immediate post-war years as being pretty terrible and depressing, but that the hard work of clearing and rebuilding gave everyone hope and a clear, communal, purpose.
(To give just one example of how desperate those times were: one of the tasks my father specialized in was retrieving nails from the rubble, and straightening them out with pliers, an anvil, and a hammer for reuse.)
Based on my Dad’s recollections, I have no doubt that the iconic images of the “Trümmerfrauen” is firmly based in historic reality.
Thanks for sharing what your Dad went through, Tilman. It fits with what I’ve learned over the years. When there’s that much destruction, everyone had to help, no matter who they were. Glad you enjoyed the post!
It sounds like the author is denying this occurred. Is that the case? I recently read Letters From Nuremberg about Mr Dodd’s letters to his wife and family in the US. There were numerous pictures that would seem to indicate it was happening in that non – Soviet held city.
You’re right, Pat, there are many pictures of women cleaning rubble. The author argued that these are basically anecdotal, and don’t reflect the fact that most of the work was done by others. Some of the photos were also propaganda shots. In a way it makes sense; a photographer might make a shot of women in the rubble because it was such a novel thing, while a photo of men with cranes or trucks is less dramatic. So the fact that photos of Trümmerfrauen are widespread doesn’t mean the situation was that common. On the other hand, like I said in my post, it seemed to have happened in many, many places, enough that it can be taken as a kind of truth. Thanks for reading!