Tag Archives: trummerfrau

The German Myth Nobody Wants Debunked

23 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by in Books, postwar, Women

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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 Trümmerfrauen bei der Arbeitis 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

Two kinds of Woman

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Women

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Postwar Germany has two iconic views of women — the Trummerfrau and what the GIs called Veronika Dankeschön. Of course not every woman could be squeezed into one category or other, but they reflect two extreme ways women made do in the postwar world.

Bundesarchiv

Bundesarchiv

I’ll start with the “heroic” icon, the Trummerfrau. It literally means “rubble woman,” and that’s exactly what they were, the women who hammered bricks, shifted the ruins off the streets, salvaged materials for reconstruction. In Berlin alone, about 60,000 women did this work for the extra rations they were entitled to. A woman whose main job was mother and hausfrau received a lot less to eat than the women who cleared the streets. Food rations were everything, especially when the women supported old people and children in the home.

They had to. Their men were missing, killed, severely wounded or emotionally scarred. Suicides after the war were likely to be men. For those few immediate postwar years, the women held society together and laid the groundwork for the country Germany would become, an unusual freedom that would evaporate in the 1950s.

The opposite of the trouser-wearing, dusty, hard working Trummerfrau was the girl people in the era would call “loose,” to put it mildly. The Veronika Dankeschön — the initials purposely spell VD, a serious problem in the postwar world —  used her sex to get the basic things she needed and wanted. Nylons were the stereotype, but women went out with Allied soldiers for many other reasons — food and cigarettes, new music in the Allied clubs, even the hope of marrying and being taken to another country. There was a shortage of German men and a surplus of Allied men, so none of this was a surprise.

Not every woman who went out with an Allied soldier was a Veronika. Plenty of young German women just wanted to have some fun after the war, meet new people, open up to the world. Many did eventually marry. But the Germans as a whole looked warily at the girl who dated an Allied soldier. She might be called an Ami-liebchen (American-lover), a term just short of prostitute.

Once (western) German society stabilized in the 1950s, the Trummerfrau and the Veronika made way for the new ideal of German women. It looked a lot like the old one — respectable wife and mother, a support for her man. What women did in the immediate postwar years to keep their families fed, have fun or seek advantages was swept under the rug. An embarrassment for some, a cause for shame. The postwar years were considered immoral, a time most Germans wanted to forget almost as much as they wanted to forget the war.

*Photo 1: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-25093-0003 / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons