Report: German Studies Association Conference 2003
Session 162: Savior, Victim, Sexual Revolutionary: The Threat and Power
of the Independent Woman in Reconstruction Germany

Moderator: Jennifer Evans, Carleton University

"Finding a Way Home: Civilian Evacuees, the Family, and Victim Status in
Postwar Germany and France"
Julia S. Torrie, St. Thomas University

"Victims, Whores, or Fallen Girls? Allied and German Attitudes Towards
Female VD Cases in Occupied Germany"
Annette F. Timm, University of Calgary

"The Beate Uhse Myth: Marketing and the Creation of a Post-Fascist
Sexual Sensibility in West Germany"
Elizabeth Heineman, University of Iowa

Commentator: Jennifer Evans, Carleton University

In this panel, the three papers presented compelling re-evaluations of
women's relationship to post-1945 West German history. From the early
_Zusammenbruch_ to the sexual revolution, they assessed the role of
independent women in the arena of postwar rebuilding, highlighting the
place of the war in challenging gendered assumptions of respectability
while fostering new obstacles to overcome. These papers demonstrated
that the figure of the independent woman could be much more than an
object to control and manage; they showed that the very dislocation and
ruin that played such a constitutive part in shaping women's postwar
experience, making women objects of state control and managed behavior,
could also open up new spaces for the negotiation of private and public
selves.

Perhaps by necessity, home and the domestic idyll was a constant feature
in all the presentations. Julia Torrie's paper, "Finding a Way Home:
Civilian Evacuees, the Family, and Victim Status in Postwar Germany and
France" explored its place as an elusive ideal of life before the
collapse. In her discussion of the various strategies employed by
local-level resettlement organizations and zonal authorities in dealing
with civilian resettlement, she outlined the assumptions at work in
trying to meet the pressing need for housing in the early postwar
period. Attempting to differentiate themselves from the legions of
expellees, female evacuees tried a variety of options in seeking
redress. Despite their attempt to politicize their plight, they remained
largely at the mercy of local authorities, who quickly equated social
weakness and dislocation with moral decay. This nostalgia for a pre-war
sense of rootedness posed the prospect of recovering lost idylls of
family, of order, and stability; but Torrie shows that the nostalgic
ideal caved in on itself, as local and state authorities undermined
their own efforts at propping up the family through an emphasis on
unrealistic requirements for resettlement which few could muster in
these difficult times.

Jennifer Evans enjoyed Torrie's discussion of how female evacuees framed
their quest for housing in the language of entitlements and rights,
never totally distancing themselves from their role as victims of the
war. In highlighting recent material on emasculated male returnees,
Evans wondered whether the conditions afoot in the postwar period
necessarily blurred the boundaries between masculine and feminine
behavior. As opposed to this image of the exhausted German male, the
female evacuee appeared forthright, crafty, driven, and political,
creating not just a dichotomous foil to the postwar man, but a range of
responses to dislocation itself, and the ways in which it challenged
preferred visions of comportment, healthfulness, and respectability
across gender.

Annette Timm's paper, "Victims, Whores, or Fallen Girls? Allied and
German Attitudes Towards Female VD Cases in Occupied Germany", explored
women's complex relationship to police, health, and welfare discourses
of endangerment and containment in postwar Berlin. She argued that
unlike their German counterparts, the Allies presented a more tempered
response to the question of the origins of disease transmission,
preferring like the British to view social dislocation (as opposed to
mere licentiousness) as the cause for alarm. In policing bars, clubs,
and the city streets themselves, police and welfare authorities employed
a host of assumptions regarding sexual behavior and gender identity.
Although the focus of Allied and German intervention was the semi-public
world of the street, the cinema, and the bar, as Timm's previous work
has shown, the home was always present in terms of the discussion, not
just for the ways in which it served as an ideal, but especially for how
it featured in the unspoken transmission of disease from husband to
wife. Here protective measures reinforced traditional notions of gender,
but the Allies weren't simply interested in policing women's behavior;
in addition to protecting Allied soldiers themselves, Timm suggested
that these policies may have actually reflected a degree of gender
parity when viewed as likewise directed against transients and male
prostitutes.

Jennifer Evans thought Timm's argument about gender parity or
equalization was an important one to consider when thinking about the
policing of transgressive sexuality in the urban milieu. But just like
women, men and their masculinities were varied and invested with
different meaning at different stages in the process of rebuilding. She
wondered whether the changing priorities of the Allies in influencing
the terms of the debate at various stages in the postwar period, from
1945 to 1949 and then on to 1953 similarly gave rise to shifting images
of the diseased and fallen woman?

Elizabeth Heineman's paper "The Beate Uhse Myth: Marketing and the
Creation of a Post-Fascist Sexual Sensibility in West Germany" provided
an interesting look at how important both co-existing and overlapping
images of gender were to the self-presentation of the doyenne of sexual
pleasure. Since her early days in the business of selling pleasurable
sex, Uhse marketed her own image in the quest to sell commodities as
well as the message of sexual enlightenment. Promoting her business from
her position as a wife and mother in the 1950s reflected savvy business
acumen as Uhse recognized that lingering trauma from the end of the war
necessitated that messages of sexual enlightenment be linked to the
family ideal. Heineman suggested that this went beyond simple marketing
strategy; Uhse's creations also allowed average people to enter into
their own self-fashioning through fantasy and the erotic. Only with the
advent of the sexual revolution in the 1960s could the search for sexual
gratification encompass both images of Uhse as mother and fighter pilot
as she resurrected her war experience in order to tap into men's and
women's nostalgia for certain aspects of the Nazi past (i.e. personal
fulfillment in the context of mass politics). In this way, the home
became eroticized at the same time that the erotic was becoming
domesticated, packaged and sold to willing customers through catalogues
and eventually boutiques. Capitalizing on the sexualized woman to
transform the terms of the debate about morality and the acceptable –
and making a good living in the process – Heineman argued that Uhse's
empire must also be viewed as made possible via the selective memory of
National Socialism, recast as part of the quest for personal fulfillment
and satisfaction.

Evans wondered if recent scholarship has stressed the emphasis on
pleasure, personal fulfillment, health, satisfaction, and personality as
marking the place of the individual within mass society, late
capitalism, and the consumerist ethos of the West, how might we evaluate
Beate Uhse's place in this history? To what extent was her success part
of a larger set of changes at work in the late 20th century and, at the
same time, how was this bounded off from the distinctive processes
informing societal and political change in post-Nazi Germany?

An energetic discussion ensued in the time remaining, marking the
importance of these papers in setting new questions on the agenda for
evaluating women's (and men's) relationship to dislocation,
transgression, and the erotic in the postwar period.

Jennifer Evans
Carleton University


For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2003 German Studies
Association Conference, please visit <http://www.g-s-a.org>.

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