Tag Archives: war

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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The Girl and the Dwarf King, or a POW’s fairy tale

02 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in Books, Uncategorized

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Das MäschenI have two small daughters, and I can be a bit sappy about that, so I couldn’t resist a post about Das Mädchen und der Zwergkönig, a fairy tale written by a German prisoner of war for his daughter Helga in 1945/46. I was cleaning out one of those dusty corners of my bedroom and found the little green book tucked away and forgotten. But its sentiment — the love the author had for a daughter he’d never seen — shouldn’t be.

Once there was a little girl who lived many years alone with her mother because her father was away at war.

That’s the first line of the book, under the chapter title: How Little Helga Freed her Papa.

The story starts with a problem children all over postwar Europe knew: Helga’s family had no more food. So she sets off into the forest to pick berries. But they weren’t hers to pick; the Dwarf King shows up angry at her theft. To make good, she picks the sweetest ones high in the bushes for him. After the dwarf stuffs himself, he’s in a better mood and gives the girl a wish. She asks if her Papa is still alive. Yes, said the dwarf, and he proceeds to give her hints how she can cross the big forest to the castle where her Papa and other soldiers were held captive.

That these were German soldiers and this was WW2 was beside the point. For the purposes of the fairy tale, there was no politics. Just a girl looking for her father. Clemens Köster wrote and illustrated the story while a prisoner of war in France. There’s not much information about what exactly he did in Reims, but it’s clear someone helped him get the paper, ink, watercolors and brushes that he used to write the book and paint pictures of Helga, the Dwarf King and his helpers, and other characters. Somehow, I’m not all that surprised a POW of all people managed to find those supplies, even in a postwar France slowly recovering from German occupation.

In 1946 Köster carried the book with him when he returned to Germany. He found his 4-year-old daughter in the hospital with scarlet fever. Later she described bits of the scene in interviews. She had never seen him before, but his picture sat next to her bed. When he came in, she immediately called out, “Papi!” And he presented her the book as his gift.

Years later when Helga was diagnosed with cancer, she remembered the little book that she had loved as a child and read to her three children. The Bayerischen Krebsgesellschaft published it in 2006 and all proceeds went to cancer research.

 

 

Filming the Holocaust

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Allies, Jewish life, Media, postwar

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Most of us have seen film footage of the concentration camps. Just the mention of them conjures up in our minds the piles of corpses, or the ovens. In the immediate postwar years, those images were new for most people, and even more shocking than they are for us now. Army film crews recorded thousands of hours of footage in an attempt to capture the scope of what happened.

The Allies guessed surprisingly early how important it was to present proof of the  atrocities in the form of film. The Germans were to see what they had allowed under the Nazi regime, and the world at large was to see the unthinkable acts committed in the shadows of an already dark war.

Earlier this year, HBO broadcast Night Will Fall, a look at what happened to the “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” a dry name for a horrific compilation of footage of Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz and Dachau. Alfred Hitchcock supervised the production, but his big name wasn’t enough to keep the project afloat. The British government canceled, and the footage was stored at the Imperial War Museum until it was unearthed in the 1980s, then digitized and restored in 2010.

Why was the original project canceled? “Night Will Fall” director André Singer told the LA Times that postwar priorities shifted quickly; the British saw the need for Germany to get back on its feet (no doubt in the face of the Soviet threat). Reminders of the camps wouldn’t help.  Authorities also worried the footage of the camps would create more sympathy for the Jews wanting to go to Palestine, a difficult political topic before the founding of Israel.

Some of Hitchcock’s footage was recycled for Billy Wilder and Hanus Burger’s short, finished documentary Death Mills, which was shown in the US and British Zones of Germany in 1946. Pregnant women were warned not to go see it.

Ten years after the end of the war, Alain Resnais directed what I consider one of the most moving films about the camps, Night and Fog. I saw it in high school and have never forgotten it.

Lost Tunnels

20 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Everyday life, postwar

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The true tragedy of the bombing war in World War II was measured in human lives. The numbers can vary, but here’s an idea of the devastation bombardments brought to the Axis Powers. (I think 70 years after the war, we can admit the bombs were awful for common people without getting into an argument about who deserved what).

The end of the war meant the end of bombs, but it would be years before reconstruction in Germany made a dent in the damage. In Essen, the city I live in,  the Allies targeted anything within range of the Krupp Steel Works. Ninety percent of the city center was destroyed or severely damaged.

90%. I can imagine my hometown in Michigan, the main drag where all the shops and restaurants are clustered — in ruins.

bunker feiheit mapBut back to Essen. Hard to believe, but thousands of people lived under those ruins. For years. Not just in cellars of collapsed or shaky buildings. Many lived in a tunnel system near the main train station. Some if not all the tunnels were from old coal mines — some hundreds of years old and lost to memory — that still snake under the city. Not long ago, the authorities closed down a part of the Autobahn near here because of one of these lost tunnels. They’re everywhere.

In one of my next posts, I’ll describe how people lived down in the dark.

 

 

Party like it’s 1945

08 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Allies, postwar, Soviets

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kapitulationHappy May 8.

It’s been 69 years since World War 2 ended. The German military capitulated to the western allies, but the main signatures were done in Berlin, in the Soviet HQ in Karlshorst.

The German-Russian Museum is there now. Today the Russian ambassador to Germany and a Ukrainian diplomat are scheduled to toast the anniversary. A toast for peace —  a big gesture, considering what’s been going on in the Ukraine lately.

This goes to show how alive World War 2 is for the former Soviet Union. No wonder — 27 million of their people died. When it was finally over, on the night of May 8 and 9, 1945, there was a party to end all parties. It took place in a room you can see if you head to the German-Russian Museum. The hall where the capitulation was signed is preserved as it was, the flags of the 4 allied powers on the wall, the tables arranged as they were on that fateful night. Alcohol flowed – no big surprise when the Russians were throwing the bash — and apparently General Schukow himself did some fancy dancing. schukow_georgij400

Of course, the Germans of the time had nothing to celebrate. Even people grateful for peace — and most were after 6 years of war — lived in shock, helplessness and blatant fear. Especially in Berlin, May 8 was the start (or the continuation) of a horrendous time for German women and girls raped and assaulted by mostly Russian soldiers. The city smoldered after the Battle of Berlin. There was no order, no government, no safety. A time of chaos.

But the deadliest war in history was over. A moment to celebrate.