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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.>
List of 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
About the author
Karen Hagemann DAAD Visiting Professor for German and European Studies,Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto Stefanie Schüler-Springorum Director, Institute for the History of German Jews, Hamburg
