Full Description
We are all acutely aware of the devastation and upheaval that result from war. Less obvious is the extent to which the military and war impact on the gender order. This book is the first to explore the intersections of the military, war and gender in twentieth-century Germany from a variety of different perspectives. Its authors investigate the relevance of the military and war for the formation of gender relations and their representation as well as for the construction of individual and social agency for both genders in civil society and the military. They inquire about the origins and development of gendered images as they were shaped by war. They expound on the multifarious mechanisms that served to reconstruct or newly form gender relations in the postwar periods. They analyze the participation of women and men in the creation of wars as well as the gender-specific meaning of their respective roles. Finally, they investigate the different ways of remembering and coming to terms with the two great military conflicts of the very violent twentieth century.
The book focuses on the period before, during and after the two World Wars, closely linked 'total wars' that mobilized both the 'front' and the 'home-front' and increasingly blurred the boundaries between them. Drawing on sources ranging from forces newspapers to German pilot literature, police reports on women's food riots to oral history interviews with soldiers' wives, the richly documented case studies of Home/Front add the long-overdue gender dimension to the cultural and historical debates that surround these two great military conflicts.
Contents
Contents Preface ix Introduction Home/Front The Military, Violence and Gender in the Age of the World Wars 1 Karen Hagemann 1 Ready for War? Conceptions of Military Manliness in the Prusso-German Officer Corps before the First World War 43 Marcus Funck 2 German Comrades - Slavic Whores Gender Images in the German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War 69 Robert L. Nelson 3 Motherly Heroines and Adventurous Girls Red Cross Nurses and Women Army Auxiliaries in the First World War 87 Bianca Sch"nberger 4 Homefront Food, Politics and Women's Everyday Life during the First World War 115 Belinda J. Davis 5 Enemy Images Race and Gender Stereotypes in the Discussion on Colonial Troops. A Franco-German Comparison, 1914-1923 139 Christian Koller 6 Gender Wars The First World War and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Weimar Republic 159 Birthe Kundrus 7 Body Damage War Disability and Constructions of Masculinity in Weimar Germany 181 Sabine Kienitz 8 Flying and Killing Military Masculinity in German Pilot Literature, 1914-1939 205 Stefanie Sch ler-Springorum 9 Comradeship Gender Confusion and Gender Order in the German Military, 1918-1945 233 Thomas K hne 10 Rape The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmacht, 1939-1944 255 Birgit Beck 11 Remembering and Repressing German Women's Recollections of the 'Ethnic Struggle' in Occupied Poland during the Second World War 275 Elizabeth Harvey 12 Erotic Fraternization The Legend of German Women's Quick Surrender 297 Susanne zur Nieden 13 Cold War Communities Women's Peace Politics in Postwar West Germany, 1945-1952 311 Irene Stoehr 14 Men of Reconstruction - The Reconstruction of Men Returning POWs in East and West Germany, 1945-1955 335 Frank Biess A Selected Bibliography The Military, War and Gender in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany 359 Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Sch ler-Springorum Notes on Contributors 383 Index 387
