Tag Archives: German

Wives and the postwar husband problem

02 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by in Everyday life, postwar, Women

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Berlin, Tanz im Freien

ADN-ZB/ dpd Berlin 1947 Tanz im Freien. 573-47

I’ve written before about how changed German women were after the war. But what happened to the relationships between wives and their husbands?

Annegrete Baum’s Frauenalltag und Empanzipation talks about the hard realities German husbands faced when they came home after 1945. On paper, nothing had changed. Marriage was still regulated by laws drawn up in 1900. A husband controlled his wife’s money and whether she could work outside the home. He dictated her roll with their children. He had the right to decide where the family would live, what furniture and appliances the home might have, and when meals would be served.

The war changed all that. The problem was, many men, exhausted and demoralized from the war, couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that anything had changed. After all he’d sacrificed, he could be lord of his house again, couldn’t he? But a husband who tried to reestablish his dominant role sometimes got this reaction from his wife, as one woman wrote in 1948:

He orders us around and isn’t happy with anything. Didn’t he have enough of orders in the war? He thinks he has the right to demand a cozy home. I think he doesn’t have the right to demand a thing. (1)

The result — many couples walked away from their marriages. In Catholic (!) Bavaria, for instance, the divorce rate rose from 4.7% in 1938 to 16.5% in 1949.

With letters from women, the screenwriter and moderator Walther von Hollander tried to understand why rates of divorce shot up in Germany after the war. The core reason was how well women took on responsibilities that used to be reserved for men. That translated into control over their money and, as an extension, a new sexual freedom. And these changes were happening on a home front where the women fought to survive the bombardments and invasion. Women saw themselves as soldiers as much as their men. Husbands had no right to claim special privileges when they got home.

Hollander also had to admit part of the problem was simple. The men had lost the war.

But as a wise female physician observed, they returned not infrequently with the look of winners. “Women,” the physician said, “entrusted their lives to the men, and even trustingly followed them into the war, which they rejected internally. The women knew a long time ago that the war was lost. But the men assured them that they would still win it. Now, after the defeat, they cannot demand that we continue to entrust ourselves to their leadership.

What about couples who stayed together? A 1948 episode of the radio show “Guten Morgen, liebe Hausfrau” offered advice for a good postwar marriage.

Men live on illusions! To let him have them — that’s the secret of a cleverly conducted marriage. Why take away his illusion that he’s the lord of the house?(2)

 

 

(1) My translation from Baum p.95.

(2) My translation from Baum p.96

Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-P0506-505 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Der Spiegel — The Mirror

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Media, postwar

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If there’s a news magazine anywhere in the world as thick, diverse and indepth as the German Der Spiegel, I’d like to know about it. Since 1947, the weekly with the red-rimmed cover has analyzed German and world events with its own flair, a spark of independence that must have sometimes irked the allied powers during the occupation of Germany.

Spiegel was modeled after American and British news magazines. When it first appeared in the British Zone in January 1947, it had a small but significant readership, limited at the time by the postwar paper shortages. In its first few years, it developed a reputation for precise, factual journalism that it largely still holds today. It tries to be what good journalism should be — a watchdog over the government. It took to heart the goal of the Allies, who wanted to encourage a free press in Germany after years of Goebbels’ propaganda machine.

The Spiegel archives are a goldmine. Digitized as text and scanned so you can see the actual pages. If you read German and have a lot of time on your hands, browse the early postwar issues — for free. Just click on the link and scroll down to the “Weitere Titelbildgalerien und Heftarchive” where the years are listed. The articles are opinionated, sometimes snarky, often humorous and always intelligent.

I’ve learned about odd things, like Graf Adalbert Keyserlingk’s orphan village on Lake Constance, largely empty in 1947 because of the bureaucratic difficulty in sending some of Germany’s 1 million orphans out of the allied zones. I learned that the Parisian fashion world started showing women with short hair again after a period when longer hair was mode. And I learned just how hard it was for German brides to get permission to marry their GI boyfriends and move to the US (I’ll be writing a post about this soon).

Oh, and the modern Spiegel is worth reading too. It has the largest circulation of any newsmagazine in Europe. And it’s outlived similar magazines like Newsweek (gone) and Time (dwindled now to almost nothing).

When pigs eat better than children

08 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Hunger

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Do hard times bring a people together?

They can. But in postwar Germany, in many instances, they didn’t. Especially in the hunger winter of 1946-47.

Hunger drove the people living in the ruined cities out into the countryside. They 414px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-S80285,_Bahnhof_Gorgast,_'Hamsterfahrt'traded anything they could spare for food. The “hamsters” from the industrial Ruhr area clogged trains heading north to the farms in Lower Saxony, or south to the Eifel region. In backpacks and suitcases, they carried their crystal and porcelain, their damask table cloths and silver mirrors.

When the hamsters arrived in the countryside, they went on a humiliating round of the farms – begging to trade. The problem: the farmers had everything already.

Back then, Thea Merkelbach was 8 years old. Her anecdote in the book Hungerwinter sticks in my mind as a sign of how cruel people can be to others – without realizing it.

Once my mother asked for a little milk from a farmer who had 10 cows. The farmer’s wife was baking. The cookies were too dark and hard to her, so she wanted to toss them to the pigs. My mother asked for a few: ‘Give me a few before the pigs get some!’ The farmer’s wife did. She wouldn’t have thought of it herself.

In another anecdote, a boy who was 11 years old at the time told how a farmer tossed potato peels onto a dung heap for the children to eat.

From the farmers’ perspective, the hamsters from the city were a plague. Wolfgang Herchner said in Hungerwinter:

The hamsters overran the land like locusts… They stole from the farmers, sometimes in a massive way! Some fields were half dug up because cabbage or carrots had been planted there.

Even farmers who sincerely wanted to help the hungry couldn’t give to even a fraction of the people flowing in from the cities. There simply wasn’t that much to go around.

And maybe after the Nazis trumpeted the Volksgemeinschaft (a unified community of the German people) for years, some people had enough of sacrificing for others. In postwar Germany, it was every man for himself.

*Photo:Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S80285 / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons