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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 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

The men belong to us all

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by in postwar, Women

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Many more German women survived the war in freedom than men. That’s not to say women in the German armed forces and civilians came out without a scratch. The casualties from the bombing war were high, and women were interned in allied prisoner of war camps, a fact not widely known.

The women faced a shortage of men right after the war. How big a shortage?

In the Soviet Zone in 1945, there were 297 women for every 100 men between age 18-30. All over Germany, the most intensive incarceration of men happened right after the war, so it was no surprise the numbers were particularly bad. And that generation, the generation of men in their 20s, always pays a high price in war.

A couple of years later in the British Zone, the numbers look a bit better. In 1939, the year the war broke out, 33% of the German population was men between age 21 and 42. In 1947, it was 25%. In real numbers, there were 2 million more women than men in the British Zone. By the end of 1947, most of the prisoners of war held by the British and Americans had been freed. The Soviets held millions of prisoners until well into the 1950s.

So women had to make do without men, as they’d done for most of the war. They worked in reconstruction, in factories, and in other work traditionally reserved for men.

zgbdc5-68gom0ysu8w1teij3uq-originalOn the personal front, the postwar years saw a dramatic rise in divorces. Despite the man shortage, women and men walked away from quick wartime marriages, or marriages that had broken apart during the war. For women, the Allied armies offered opportunity for a new start. They might become an Ami-liebchen or strike up a relationship with other allied soldiers out of love, a survival instinct, or both.

In the immediate postwar years, the German men who were available seemed to have had loose relationships with German women in a kind of unspoken arrangement. The journalist Helga Hirsch’s book “Endlich wieder leben” portrays nine German women and their experiences from war to Wirtschaftswunder. One quotes her mother: “There aren’t enough men…and those that came back belong to us all.” It’d be a mistake to think of these relationships only in sexual terms. Postwar Germany had a shortage of just about everything, and the relationships women built tended to be practical. A man could help to repair a house or get rationed goods. That was likely more important to her than the prestige of having a man at a time when there were so few to go around.

 

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