Tag Archives: marriage

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

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Liebe, American-style

24 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Allies, Americans, postwar, Women

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Now that the posts about casual encounters between German women and allied men are out of the way, I thought it was time to do one about the couples that got hitched. The Allied Museum in Berlin has some great information about this in the book to its former exhibition “It Started With a Kiss.” I’ll focus on marriage to American GIs in this post.

It’s pretty well known that GI marriages were a phenomenon. By 1949, about 20,000 German brides and fiancés had moved to the United States. No small feat considering marriages were allowed only since December 1946. Apparently, the first American GIs requested to marry Germans in the fall of 1944 while the war still raged!

People can fall in love under any circumstances, of course, but German women and GIs started out with the kind of baggage no relationship needs. Nonfraternization laws banned romance at first, but when even officers ignored the rules, they were abandoned. The concept of collective guilt cast a shadow over all Germans, even teenage girls who spent most of their lives under Nazi rule. Romance with the victor equaled treason for some Germans.

Some Americans felt the same way. The media reported intensely about the moral dangers of Germany for the boys, and the public debated if and how German women should be allowed into the US. Women called “Nazi-Gretchens” in the US press weren’t necessarily going to be welcomed in American homes.

But there’s no stopping love. The War Brides Act in late 1945 and similar acts in later years laid the foundation for wives and children of US personnel to enter the country.

First they had to meet. Maybe at work, where Germans often took menial or clerical jobs in allied facilities and organizations. Maybe in cafés, restaurants or dance clubs. One German GI bride met her future husband on a Berlin street as she was rushing to catch a bus. She was 19, he was 24. They hit it off right away, but their road to a life together in Brooklyn had more than its share of bumps. Ursula lived in the Soviet sector of Berlin, and couldn’t get the papers to emigrate. She had to finagle an American Sector address via friends. She didn’t talk to many people about her plans out of fear someone would inform on her to the Soviet authorities. Her boyfriend returned to the States in October 1945 and worked from there to cut through the bureaucracy. Only in April 1947 did she board a flight from Tempelhof Airport to New York.

She was one of the lucky ones. She never felt foreign in her new home, since practically everybody was foreign in Brooklyn. Two years after she married, she became a US citizen.