Gender in Germany and Beyond: Exploring the Legacy of Jean Quataert 9781800739536

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Gender in Germany and Beyond

Gender in Germany and Beyond Exploring the Legacy of Jean Quataert

E E E Edited by Jennifer V. Evans and Shelley E. Rose

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Jennifer V. Evans and Shelley E. Rose

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Evans, Jennifer V., 1970- editor. | Rose, Shelley (Shelley Elizabeth) editor. Title: Gender in Germany and beyond : the legacy of Jean Quataert / edited by Jennifer V. Evans and Shelley E. Rose. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023005369 (print) | LCCN 2023005370 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800739529 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800739536 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Quataert, Jean H. (Jean Helen), 1945—Political and social views. | Women—Germany—History. | Feminism—Germany--History. | Sex role—Germany--History. | Women and socialism—Germany—History. | Human rights—Germany. Classification: LCC HQ1623 .G4476 2023 (print) | LCC HQ1623 (ebook) | DDC 305.420943—dc23/eng/20230306 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005369 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005370

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-952-9 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-953-6 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800739529

“To the next generation of scholars pushing borders.” —Jean H. Quataert, handwritten inscription in Advocating Dignity (2009)

Contents

E E E List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Chronology: The Professional Journey of Jean Quataert

xii

Introduction. Beginnings, Not Ends Kathleen Canning and Jennifer V. Evans

1

Part I. Negotiating Gender Chapter 1. Strategic Communities: Gender Self-Fashioning, Political Dissent, and the Search for Homosexual Rights in Wilhelmine Germany Glenn B. Ramsey Chapter 2. “Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” Colonial Women’s Activism in Wartime and Weimar Germany, 1914–1926 K. Molly O’Donnell

17

37

Chapter 3. Marie Juchacz and Toni Sender: Socialism, Women’s Emancipation, and Weimar Politics William Smaldone

61

Chapter 4. Gender Anxieties and Censorship in Weimar: Aufklärungsfilme and Article 118 Kara Ritzheimer

83

Part II. Mobilizing Human Rights Chapter 5. Victimhood and the Politics of Memory: The Expulsions of Danube Swabians from Yugoslavia, 1944–1948 Ute Ritz-Deutch

107

viii • Contents

Chapter 6. Coming to Grips with American Racism: Anne Moody’s Human Rights Advocacy in Germany during the Late Cold War Leigh Ann Wheeler

131

Chapter 7. Contested Progress: Women and Women’s Studies in the East and West German Historical Profession Karen Hagemann

157

Chapter 8. Reluctant Activists: Human Rights, Cleveland’s Religious Left, and El Salvador Shelley E. Rose

191

Chapter 9. How Do People Use Human Rights, and What Happens When They Do?: A Conversation with Jean H. Quataert Lora Wildenthal

208

Afterword. Jean Quataert and the Politics of the Personal Belinda Davis

232

Index

237

Illustrations

E E E Figures Figure 2.1. Membership of the Colonial Women’s League, 1908–1936. Mitgliederstand 1908–1936. 30. Jahre koloniale Frauenarbeit. Herausgegeben vom Reichskolonialbund. (Aacheners Verlags- und Druckereigesellschaft, 1936.)

39

Figure 5.1. Author’s mother, aunt, and grandmother, ca. 1946 © Ute Ritz-Deutch.

108

Figure 6.1. German edition, Erwachen in Mississippi, S. Fischer Verlag, 1970.

135

Figure 6.2. Finnish edition of Coming of Age in Mississippi. Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö (Helsinki, 1971).

141

Figure 6.3. Anne Moody, Austin Straus, and Sasha Straus, 1972. Photo and copyright permission by photographer C. Werner Bethsold. Blickwechsel: 25 Jahre Berliner Künstlerprogramm (Berliner Künsterlerprogramm des DAAD, 1988), 116; C. Bethsold email to author, 17 January 2018.

143

Figure 6.4. Heinrich Böll, author and president of PEN International, at the “Sport and Nationalism” conference in Cologne, Germany, 10 September 1972. Photo and copyright permission by photographer Brigitte Friedrich.

145

Figure 6.5. Anne Moody at PEN’s “Sport and Nationalism” conference, 10 September 1972, in Cologne, Germany. Photo and copyright permission by photographer Brigitte Friedrich.

149

Figure 8.1. Lee H. Miller, illustration for Religious Task Force on Central America pamphlet depicting Kazel, Donovan, Ford, and Clarke, 1989. Laurie S. Wiseberg & Harry Scoble Human Rights Internet Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.

196

x • Illustrations

Maps Map 5.1. Map Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, 1941–1943. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

111

Map 5.2. Vojvodina during Axis occupation by PANONIAN. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

112

Acknowledgments

E E E When Jean Quataert let it be known she was going to retire, it was not difficult for former students and colleagues to imagine ways in which her work has guided our thinking. We, editors, are grateful to the History Department at Binghamton University for supporting us in our efforts to organize a meaningful intellectual tribute. These feelings of gratitude and support only became more amplified as we stared down the reality that this extraordinary woman and scholar would soon no longer walk among us. We are especially grateful for the tremendous support from former and present department chairs Heather DeHaan, Kent Schull, and Nathanael Andrade, as well as to Jean’s colleagues and friends from around the globe who surrounded her with love and well wishes in what turned out to be her final days. Thanks also to Marion Berghahn, Sulaiman Ahmad, and the volume contributors. This volume would not have been possible without their perseverance and determination to revise their work and to celebrate Jean after her unexpected illness and death in 2021. Finally, this volume would of course not exist without Jean and her amazing career, her inspiring mentorship, and her unwavering support. Her voice rings clear throughout this volume, in the stories and chapters from our contributors, and in the unique interview with Lora Wildenthal. We will all continue to hear it as we research, teach, and mentor our own students and colleagues.

Chronology The Professional Journey of Jean Quataert Compiled by Shelley E. Rose

E E E This collection, like Jean Quataert, is special in many ways. Each contributor has a connection to Quataert and our work showcases historical narratives and methods that defy national and disciplinary borders. These are techniques each of us honed while working with Quataert, benefitting from her blend of incisive feedback and steadfast support. As Lora Wildenthal writes in this volume, one of Quataert’s professional priorities was always people. She reveled in connecting people with ideas, content, and each other. Our work here would not have been possible without this pioneering scholar who inspired and mentored us. Here is an overview of her professional journey. 1963–1967 Completed BA in International Relations at University of California, Los Angeles 1968

Received MA in History at Columbia University

1974

Received PhD in History at University of California, Los Angeles

1972–1974 Instructor in German History, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA 1975

German Academic Exchange Service Fellowship

1975–1976 Part-time Instructor, North Harris County College, Houston, TX 1976–1986 Assistant/Associate Professor of History, University of Houston-Clear Lake 1979

Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy published by Princeton University Press

1980–1981 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Research in FRG, GDR

Chronology • xiii

1982

American Council of Learned Societies/ German Academic Exchange Service Research Grant

1985

“The Shaping of Women’s Work in Manufacturing: Guilds, Households, and the State in Central Europe, 1648–1870,” published in The American Historical Review

1986

Hired at Binghamton University, State University of New York

1986–1989 Director of Women’s Studies at Binghamton University 1986

Conference “The Meaning of Gender in German History” at Rutgers University

1986

Received The Berkshire Prize for the best article in the field of history written by a woman in 1985, for “The Shaping of Women’s Work in Manufacturing: Guilds, Households and the State in Central Europe,1648–1870,” American Historical Review

1987

Received The Central European History Prize for the best article for “The Shaping of Women’s Work in Manufacturing: Guilds, Households and the State in Central Europe, 1648–1870” American Historical Review

1987

Article “The Politics of Rural Industrialization: Class, Gender, and Collective Protest in the Saxon Oberlausitz of the Late Nineteenth Century,” published in Central European History

1987

Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World published with coauthor Marilyn Boxer, published by Oxford University Press

1990–1996 Vice-Chair for Graduate Studies at Binghamton University 1993–2003 Served on United States editorial collective of Gender and History 1997

Professional Development Committee (UUP) Curriculum Award, Binghamton University, for purchase of equipment and development of a website for Modern World History

1999

Reprint Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World with coauthor Marilyn Boxer, published by Oxford University Press

1999

Chancellor’s and University Award for Excellence in Teaching, State University of New York

xiv • Chronology

2000

Began teaching “Human Rights in the 20th Century” at Binghamton University

2001

Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 published by The University of Michigan Press

2001–2002 Recipient of German Marshall Fund of the United States Research Grant 2005–2010 Participated in American-Canadian Conferences on German and European History 2006

The Gendering of Human Rights in the International Systems of Law in the Twentieth Century published in the American Historical Association Series in Global and Comparative History

2006

Brokered acquisition of Peace Action Movement Collection with Binghamton University Special Collections

2007

Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography with coeditor Karen Hagemann, published by Berghahn Books

2008

Geschichte und Geschlechter: Revisionen der neueren Deutschen Geschichte German edition of Gendering Modern German History published by Campus Verlag

2009

Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics published by University of Pennsylvania Press

2009–2010 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, State University of New York 2010–2020 Coeditor of the Journal of Women’s History 2013

Runner-up with coeditor Benita Roth for CELJ (Council of Editors of LearnedJournals) Best Public Intellectual Special Issue Award for “Human Rights, Global Conferences, and the Making of Postwar Transnational Feminisms” Journal of Women’s History

2013

JWH Conference “Changing Feminist Paradigms and Cultural Encounters: Women’s Experiences in Eastern Mediterranean History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” with Boğaziçi University and Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

Chronology • xv

2013

Conference “Genocide and Human Rights in the Era of the United Nations,” University of Wollongong, Australia.

2014

Article “International Law and the Laws of War” published in 1914–1918 online International Encyclopedia of the First World War

2015

Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy reprinted as part of Princeton Legacy Library

2017

Promoted to Distinguished Professor of History, Binghamton University, State University of New York

2017

JWH Conference “Women and Public Life in 19th and 20th century Latin American History,” in Bogotá, Colombia with Universidad de los Andes and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia

2017–2020 Bartle Professor, Binghamton University, State University of New York 2018

Article published in Human Rights Quarterly, “A New Look at International Law: Gendering the Practices of Humanitarian Medicine in Europe’s ‘Small Wars’, 1879–1907”

2020

The Routledge History of Human Rights with coeditor Lora Wildenthal published by Routledge

INTRODUCTION

E E E Beginnings, Not Ends Kathleen Canning and Jennifer Evans

In the spirit of feminist scholarship, which seeks to challenge accepted ways of doing things, we opted to write this introduction to Gender in Germany and Beyond collaboratively to showcase the impact of Jean Quataert’s work on the field of women’s and gender history. We come at her oeuvre from very different places in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history—Kathleen Canning is a specialist in the history of gender, labor, and social movements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany and of citizenship, democracy, and gender in the Weimar Republic. Jennifer Evans is an historian of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century queer sexuality, visual culture, memory, and populism. What we have in common, with each other and with Quataert herself, is a shared vision of the need for history to serve social change. Accordingly, we trace the arc of Quataert’s scholarship from her earliest writings on socialist feminism, initially in Germany and later in comparative European context, then her study of gender and the social structures of production, followed by her pursuit of philanthropy, patriotic women, and the national imagination. In the late 1990s Quataert’s scholarly perspective on the history of feminism took a global turn and led over the past decade to a sustained and deep engagement with the history of gender and human rights, including the study of gendered medical services in World War I as part of a transnational humanitarian crusade in the aftermath of the Geneva Convention. As an introduction to the chapters in this volume, that each in different ways take up core themes in Quataert’s body of work, we will reflect on the ideas and methods that were most definitive in leaving their impact on the field. But where to begin? As befitting a work that explores the impact of a feminist scholar in reconceptualizing the memories, actions, and labors that are deemed important to history and historiography, it is interesting to begin by acknowledging that both Canning and Evans have personal as well as intellectual connections to Quataert’s first book, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917.1 Canning purchased a copy

2 • Kathleen Canning and Jennifer Evans

sometime around 1980, a year after its publication. She had just embarked on her master’s studies in Heidelberg, with scarcely a female professor, much less a feminist in sight. An acute case of intellectual homesickness brought her back to the United States for a visit, during which time she bought Quataert’s book, packed it in her suitcase, and traveled back to Germany to write a master’s thesis on socialist and communist women in the Weimar Republic—a topic for which Reluctant Feminists provided an unmatched and definitive prehistory. Upon Canning’s return to the United States for graduate study at Johns Hopkins, Quataert’s monograph was in a box of books that caught the eye of the customs agents at Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) when she went to collect the items shipped from Germany. Two customs agents turned that book over again and again, as well as another on Clara Zetkin, while asking the young doctoral aspirant whether she was a socialist or a feminist and what she envisioned doing with all of these subversive books in the United States. Evans found Reluctant Feminists at a similar moment in her intellectual development, when she was researching a master’s thesis on Communist women in the 1920s at Simon Fraser University. Her adviser had allowed the project to go forward, although it was by no means his area of expertise or interest. She found intellectual support outside the Department of History, in women’s studies, where the chair—a French women’s historian—shepherded her through preparations for the defense. For Evans, Quataert’s book was iconoclastic. It gave her a language to interrogate and understand the contradictions in the Communist women’s lives, as they grappled with women’s plight after World War I in a framework that recognized class antagonism over gender trouble. In taking up questions of political organization and citizenship, along gendered lines, the book inspired her to approach Quataert to supervise her PhD dissertation, and make the trek to the United States, where she, too, was stopped at various border crossings and queried about many things, including her intentions, her sexuality, and whether she was taking a spot from an American student. Reluctant Feminists and Quataert’s subsequent articles on the shaping and structures of female labor, as well as her study of the emergence of the German welfare state (and the gendered visions of social reform that she identified in social insurance, labor legislation, and the interventions of the factory inspectorate), had a prominent place on Canning’s prelims list at Johns Hopkins, where Vernon Lidtke, an avid reader of Quataert’s work, nonetheless expressed his skepticism about the future of gender history. He asked whether it might “fizzle out” once we had covered all of the burning topics, thus leaving most of German history’s master nar-

Beginnings, Not Ends • 3

ratives, chronologies, and concepts intact. She distinctly remembers that this was a key question he posed after the conference on “The Meaning of Gender in German History,” held in 1986 at Rutgers, which Jane Caplan described as “an act of public conjugation, designed both to present some of the achievements in women’s history, and to invite a broader discussion of the ways in which this might reshape our work in and conceptions of German history.”2 Caplan’s conference report describes the discussion of Quataert’s work on “the economy and social relations in the Oberlausitz” as a particularly lively session, especially on the issue of how feminist research might “revise our understanding of major historical processes.”3 This comment captures the complex intellectual setting in which feminist scholars wrote and trained, facing both encouragement and skepticism about the capacity of gender history to change the conceptualization and narration of historical change. On the one hand, senior male historians recognized the critical energy of women’s history, while on the other hand remaining skeptical that this new scholarly initiative would change much in the way of the core narratives, conceptual or chronological tropes, and trajectories of mainstream German history.4 Preceding Reluctant Feminists by one year, Quataert and Marilyn Boxer’s Socialist Women featured essays on the relationship between socialism and feminism in Germany, Russia, Italy, France, and Austria. The analytical verve of both of these books originated in the rapid advance of both labor history and women’s history during the preceding decade. As the editors noted in their introduction to Socialist Women, both fields had thus far “ignored the conjuncture between the two historical moments.” Labor historians had tended to view “socialist women as carbon copies of male workers and failed to grasp the pervasive feminist component”5 in their struggles, while women’s historians had focused mainly on middle-class feminists active in the Anglo-American world. These two works, then, represented path-breaking new scholarship on working-class women and their “feminist” struggles in continental Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking a wide view of socialism, encompassing both socialist parties and unions, Quataert and Boxer cast feminism as an analytical category that conflicted in some instances sharply with the self-designation of socialist women activists. Feminism encompassed “all of those who supported express efforts to ameliorate the conditions of women through public organized activity, be if for educational, legal, political, economic, or social purposes.”6 Women leaders of the German socialist movement embraced what Quataert terms a “verbal tactic” to dissociate themselves from bourgeois feminism by disavowing, even scorning the term Frauenrechtlerinnen (women’s rights advocates).7 At times reluctant feminists

4 • Kathleen Canning and Jennifer Evans

even had to constrain feminist pressure on the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) or unions in the interest of proletarian unity. Conditional, ambivalent feminism was, as Quataert argues in her conclusion, “the implicit condition for effective participation in the socialist world,” particularly after the repeal of the Prussian Law on Association in 1908 that allowed women to become formal party members.8 Yet the imperative of designating socialist German women as “feminist”—despite the disavowal of this term by the historical actors under study here—was in part necessitated by the crucial distinction Quataert made between bourgeois feminism that had thus far dominated European historiography and the thus far less visible socialist women’s movement. As such, Quataert’s early scholarship approached socialist feminism as a distinctive ideology and practice that encompassed “women who saw the root of sexual oppression in the existence of private property and who envisioned a radically transformed society in which man would exploit neither man nor woman.” Theirs was a movement “for radical reconstruction” and socialist feminists were convinced of the possibility of realizing their goals fully and finally in the new society.”9 This early articulation of feminist methodology around how to approach a gulf between the self-naming of historical subjects and the analytical categories we adopt in interpreting and situating their actions remains relevant for students of feminist history today. It is not insignificant that Quataert used the categories of sex and class to delineate this tension, which also headline the field-defining 1983 volume Sex and Class in Women’s History, edited by Judith Newton, Mary Ryan, and Judith Walkowitz. This was an intriguingly rich analytical vocabulary, one in which sex encompassed both gender and sexuality. At the time, “sex and class” did much of the same interpretive work of “gender” and sometimes even appeared interchangeably.10 As we see in the language of the editors’ introduction: “we employ gender as a category of historical analysis and in so doing, we try to determine and to understand the systematic ways in which sex differences have cut through society and culture and in the process have conferred inequality upon women.”11 Looking back, sexuality remained an ambivalent presence in the initial shift to gender history.12 So, for example, Quataert’s study highlighted the terrain for conflict between theory and practice, ideology and reality, in socialist feminism. These conflicts produced uneasy alliances as well as strategic subordination of feminists on issues of the family: socialist feminist leaders often refrained from or openly repressed attention to sexual rights, pleasures, regulation, and exploitation, as well as reproductive sexuality (birth control and abortion), which would preoccupy feminists of all hues—and their critics—during the 1920s.

Beginnings, Not Ends • 5

Like much of the work on gender and sexuality, frequently pigeonholed as narrow and discreetly related to select themes, Reluctant Feminists is a political and intellectual history of the driving concepts, theory, and ideologies that defined and mobilized German feminist socialism. It is also a social history of politicization—of the transformations and conflicts over political consciousness and practice—that is embedded in Quataert’s deep understanding of the changing structures and ideologies of women’s industrial labor.13 Although she refers to her first book as a “working-class history from above,” rereading it from a present-day methodological standpoint, Quataert attends to the theoretical debates within German socialist feminism, while also viewing them as a “product of the experiences of women leaders operating in the political arena of Imperial Germany.”14 Moreover, Quataert offers insights into the subjectivities fostered within socialist subcultures, noting the “psychic and material protection” offered to its members, the ways in which the wider arenas of socialist sociability provided a reprieve from “the hardships of life,” widening consciousness while “instilling new values through socialist newspapers, books, theaters, libraries and educational courses.” In her reading, the socialist women’s movement “was a symbol of change and a challenge to traditional relationships” that gave “graphic testimony to the fact that socialism was an alternative image of life, values, and human relations.”15 Here, Quataert offers a comment not just on German social democracy but on the power and potential of feminist history-writing for how we choose to narrate our stories and how we conclude them—with an eye to the historical outcomes and legacies the socialist feminist movement fostered. The premise of Reluctant Feminists is the obvious success of the German socialist women’s movement, based on its numerical strength (by comparison with parallel movements in France, Britain, Italy, and Russia). Quataert’s analysis also reveals the extraordinary political and theoretical imagination of its eight leading figures between 1885 and 1917. Yet Reluctant Feminists is also a story of unresolved conflict and of the ultimate failure of synthesis between socialism and feminism whereby their embrace of radicalism left most German socialist women reluctant to embrace (feminist) initiatives that favored women’s interests over those of working-class struggles. The most poignant example of this conflict is perhaps the birth control/birth strike debate of 1912–13. Socialist feminists could scarcely overlook the disciplinary and punitive attempts of the state to prevent the advertisement and sale of contraceptives in the face of a declining birth rate; it was relatively easy to expose and oppose such government measures. Even if they could widely acknowledge the widespread use of birth control by rank-and-file members of the socialist

6 • Kathleen Canning and Jennifer Evans

women’s movement, the idea of a birth strike, proposed by socialist doctors Bernstein and Moses as a means of ameliorating the material burdens on working-class women’s bodies and the material life of their families, went too far for radical socialist feminists Clara Zetkin and Luise Zietz. The vehement debate that filled a hall in 1913 in Berlin-Neukölln saw these same leaders favor the interests of class and party over the demands of rank-and-file women to be released from the compulsion to bear children Gebärzwang (literally translated as “forced birthing”).16 Quataert’s study concludes without resolution: in fact, the socialist women’s movement, like the broader Social Democratic Party, split in two in 1917 and again in December 1918 with the emergence of the Communist Party as well as the two (or three) groups of socialist feminists, now all proclaimed citizens through the Revolution of 1918–19. Even as new citizens, however, they remained divided over the life-anddeath question of the form of political representation—suffrage versus the revolutionary councils as a new form of governance.17 At the time of its publication, it was easy to conclude that—in the face of this continued division—“the socialist women’s movement had only a minor impact on the German working class in general,”18 not least because the socialist feminist movement failed to win over the mass of working-class women at this critical moment. Yet we might be tempted today to rewrite this conclusion by pointing to the fact that the declaration of equal suffrage as the first public proclamation of a revolution, and as the founding act of Weimar democracy, is unthinkable without the decades of theoretical and practical work of German socialist feminists. Nor can we imagine the particular shape of Weimar democracy, which elevated socialist and bourgeois women, side by side, to stewardship of an expanded welfare state, without this history of socialist feminist claims to participatory citizenship. In a Journal of Modern History review essay, Quataert made this point quite clearly: “As constituent elements of the Left, the ideologies of socialism and feminism met on the political terrain of democratic reforms and civic equality.”19 Lurking in this presumption of modest or failed impact is that sense described at the outset of this introduction that the studies of gender or sexuality only matter when and where they have a transformative effect, challenging master narratives, mainstream history, established chronologies and causalities instead of simply making a good, strong contribution to the field in its own right. One lesson or legacy of Reluctant Feminists is that we should continue to approach the ground of feminist history, whether of gender, sexuality, or the body, through the lens of tension, ambivalences, and lack of resolution. We should resist the need for closure or measurable impact (ruptures, reversals, returns), by which history

Beginnings, Not Ends • 7

lives up to its deepest causal expectation, one that also considers impact measurable only when it is transformative of something larger than itself.20 Quataert is also a foremost historian of what might best be termed the “gendered social” long before the cultural turn cast doubt on and effectively displaced the central category of the “social.”21 The recent reinvigoration of the social directs attention back to a domain that emerged through the combined practices of identification, imagination, and intervention that aimed to secure social reproduction, not least of laboring bodies and capacities. Quataert’s collection of articles, not least her prize-winning American Historical Review article from 1985, “The Shaping of Women’s Work in Manufacturing,” on women, labor, social reform, and the emergent social state highlight the changing meanings of the “social question” over the nineteenth century, extending the lens back to the seventeenth century, with a richly detailed analysis of hitherto unused sources. Suggesting that critical theory had lost track of its long-standing social dimension, literary critic Judith Butler calls for a “reanimation of the social,” not least as a category that “opens up a certain notion of transformation” and that allows us “to perceive social structure as contingently organized and capable of transformation.”22 Here, too, Quataert’s astute analyses of the long history of the gendered German welfare state suggest ways her work was consistently avant la lettre. Her signature, prize-winning article in Central European History on the factory inspectorate and reprinted in John Fout’s collection on German Women in the Nineteenth Century, delved deeply into gendered state formation, forging crucial links between the histories of labor, family, and state welfare that most German historians at the time had scarcely investigated. The scope, creativity, and archival depth of her first decade of scholarly production distinguished these articles and made her the most influential German feminist labor historian working in English at the time. Quataert’s article on proto-industrialization, collective action, and manufacturing offers remarkable insight into the relationship between and among cloth (linen and wool) production in guilds, households, and the manufacturing workshops that began to serve more distant markets. If in her work, forms of labor were the ground of the social, their transformation prompted nothing less than the expansion of the regulatory and governmental capacity of the state in place of the weakening guilds. She charts none other than the emergence of the ready-made garment industry from this longer-term process of restructuring production, encompassing conflict over looms and wheels, wages and skills, as well rising consumer desires for new clothing styles and fabrics. Quataert’s notion of the social encompassed production and consumption, labor, and the emergent regulatory state, as well as the day-to-day negotiations and divi-

8 • Kathleen Canning and Jennifer Evans

sions of labor within manufacturing households, which remarkably, as she herself argued, left women’s work unrecognized and unmarked as labor in the sense of state regulation or social insurance. Inspired by the materially grounded historical work of E. P. Thompson and ethnographies of class formation and identity, she made the case for more attention to linkages between intimate matters of the home, family, and work, articulating a methodology for rendering visible women’s emergent political consciousness. Simply put, “women (in the Oberlausitz) exercised power and exerted influence—the very stuff of which politics generally is made.”23 It was in this early corpus that Quataert also demonstrated an acumen for weaving together diverse and varied sources, from personal letters to factory reports and petitions to court case files. She made the Prussian factory inspectorate come alive as multisided, complex historical actors instead of faceless bureaucrats. She revealed their capacities as ethnographers of the workplace, whose observations from the shop floor became the raw material for the German social reform imagination and for specific reforms of the labor codes. These fascinating mediators of labor and lifeworlds reshaped both moral and material conditions of labor—often to the dismay of factory owners—exposing, for example, sexual abuse on the part of foremen and prescribing changes to the physical plant of the mills (ventilation, lunchrooms, overtime), while at the same time seeking to impose bourgeois codes of comportment on teenage and female workers. She also discovered those rare female ethnographers of female industrial labor, students of Weber and Schmoller’s sociology whose disciplined social gaze was inflected by gender in fascinating ways.24 Jean Quataert’s legacy is to have given us deeply grounded archival research, framed by sharp probing of analytical concepts and historical processes—from socialist feminism to the formation of state and social, to the forms of social investigation and labor regulation that were definitive of the German welfare state, to the gendered structures, sites, and experiences of labor. It is evident in several of the chapters in this volume by her former students, the importance she placed on archivally driven research into the intersections between personal experience and the regulation of the state. During the 1990s she widened her geographic scope considerably beyond German-speaking Europe through her coeditorship of a special issue of Gender & History on “Gendered Colonialisms in African History” with Nancy Rose Hunt and Tessie Liu. Quataert collaborated again with Marilyn Boxer in producing the ground-laying transnational history of women and gender, Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present (1999), a significant expansion and revision of the earlier Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World

Beginnings, Not Ends • 9

(1987). She would go on to establish a global history course at Binghamton University, out of which later sprang courses in human rights. In the meantime, while this interest in the global dimension of feminist activism and social organization was taking root, Quataert produced a second monograph that explored women’s complex place in nineteenth-century Germany from a radically different vantage point, namely through the work of patriotic women loyal to crown and country. Staging Philanthropy saw Quataert engage more fulsomely with anthropological approaches to memory, identity, ritual, and performance. At stake was no less a rewriting of the history of the Kaiserreich. Although patriotic masculinity, national belonging, and sacrifice have been accorded a central place in German nationalism and modernity, Quataert offered an especially novel approach to analyzing patriotism through the prism of elite women whose caring, volunteerism, and sacrifice helped forge first an empire and then a nation.25 It was at this point in her career that Jean Quataert turned away from the history of the nation toward a more transnational view of feminist organizing, which married her interest in activist scholarship with the real world and advanced her evidence-based approaches to the history of gender disenfranchisement, racial inequality, and articulations of resilience. A focus on human rights became a way for her to tap back into her earlier work on politicization, work, family life, and gendered organizing. As is her stock in trade, she took up the challenge with verve, writing Advocating Dignity (2009) against the emerging orthodoxy that periodized human rights and humanitarianism as linked to the post-1945 moment, critiquing the focus of that orthodoxy on the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s while effacing the global history of feminist and anti-racist organizing.26 Running parallel was a decade of fruitful collaborations with colleagues at Binghamton University, including Elisa Camiscioli and Leigh Ann Wheeler, shepherding new research into the pages of the Journal of Women’s History while also serving as coeditor of The Routledge History of Human Rights (2019) with Lora Wildenthal.27 In this volume, former students, colleagues, and collaborators have come together to celebrate the numerous ways in which Jean Quataert’s research and mentorship has shaped and reshaped the field of modern German, European, women’s, and transnational history. The result of this lifetime of activist history-writing has yielded tremendous and longlasting results. When measured against the impact it has had on individual, scholarly lives, Jean Quataert’s scholarship wedged open a space for trenchant histories of gender, war, and social movements at a time

10 • Kathleen Canning and Jennifer Evans

when the fight within programs and departments was very real, as we suggested at the outset of this chapter. The cumulative outcomes constitute a bounty of riches, including new writing on the history of German colonialism and women’s colonial leagues, recast study of the tensions in late Weimar socialism, the complexities of turn of the century gay and lesbian rights organizing, the regulation of girlhood in Weimar Germany, and the spatial rebuilding of post–World War II Berlin and Frankfurt.28 Less well known are the supervisions Quataert undertook after her much beloved husband Don’s passing in 2011 of PhD students at Binghamton completing doctorates in Turkish social and gender history. Jean Quataert has been a guiding force for a full three generations of feminist scholars, many of whom have contributed to this volume. In the spirit, then, of feminist scholarly writing, of making the intangible, personal impact explicit in how we shape our field of inquiry, which has the necessary effect of challenging often exclusionary logics of convention, the volume includes an interview conducted by Lora Wildenthal. Additionally, the chapters in this volume take up several distinct themes. The purpose of pulling them together was not to interact with Quataert’s core conceptual ideas. Rather, it was to allow her former students, colleagues, and friends the opportunity to illustrate—by doing—how her scholarship has broadened the field of German gender history but also the study of global consciousness of race, human rights, social organizations and networks, memory, performance, and identity. Jean Quataert was always a pioneer. She was one of the first of her generation hired explicitly for a position in women’s studies and later in the field of women’s history. She conducted primary source research into nineteenth-century labor practices in regional archives in the German Democratic Republic, at a time when access was by no means guaranteed. She argued vociferously that analyses of total war must engage the question of gender, sacrifice, and the home front. From her prizewinning articles on proto-industrialization to her analysis of female citizenship through philanthropy and later advocacy of transnational histories of human rights, Quataert has spent a lifetime encouraging students and colleagues alike to broaden how we write, teach, and conceptualize the historical agency of everyday people. In this volume, we explore the common thread that Jean Quataert has woven throughout her career: the historical is political. Pushing for new frameworks of intellectual work as a form of social action, Jean Quataert has always challenged her readers, colleagues, and students to reach beyond accepted boundaries. The volume ends with a set of reflections for how we might imagine new beginnings, buoyed by the legacy of a feminist scholar whose tireless historical interventions allowed many new perspectives to thrive.

Beginnings, Not Ends • 11

Kathleen Canning is dean of the School of Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of History at Rice University. She was previously Sonya O. Rose Collegiate Professor of History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History, Women’s Studies, and German at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Languages of Labor and Gender and Gender History in Practice (Cornell University Press, 2006). She is a coeditor of Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (Berghahn Books, 2010). Her most recent work is on citizenship, gender, and democracy in the aftermath of World War I. Jennifer Evans is professor of European history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She writes about German and transnational histories of sexuality, visual culture, social media, and memory. She is the author of Life Among the Ruins. Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship after Fascism (Duke University Press, 2023). Alongside her academic writing, she undertakes collaborative digital projects like the New Fascism Syllabus and the German Studies Collaboratory.29

Notes 1. This introduction builds on the keynote address given by Kathleen Canning at Jean Quataert’s Retirement Symposium on 15 September 2017 in Binghamton, New York. . Quataert, Reluctant Feminists. 2. Caplan, “The Meaning of Gender in German History Rutgers University, 25–27 April 1986,” 36. 3. Caplan, “The Meaning of Gender in German History Rutgers University, 25–27 April 1986,” 37. 4. For overviews of the changing field of gender studies in German history, see Canning, Gender History in Practice; Quataert and Hagemann, ed., Gendering Modern German History; Hagemann and Harsch, “Gendering Central European History,” 114–27; and Hagemann, Harsch, and Bruhofener, eds., Gendering Post-1945 German History. 5. Boxer and Quataert, Socialist Women, 3. 6. Boxer and Quataert, Socialist Women, 6. 7. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 11. 8. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 231. 9. Boxer and Quataert, Socialist Women, 6. 10. When gender did break away from sex some years later, many feminist historians embraced it as an analytical rupture and liberation. 11. Newton, Ryan, and Walkowitz, Sex and Class in Women’s History, 1. 12. Even Joan Scott uses sex as a foil in her discussion of the importance of gender as connoting power relations within socially constructed institutions within society. See Scott, “Gender,” 1053–75.

12 • Kathleen Canning and Jennifer Evans 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 7. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 14 and 232. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 5. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 97–99. Canning, Gender History in Practice. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 219. Canning, Barndt, and McGuire, eds., Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects; Leng, Sexual Politics and Feminist Science Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900–1933; Grossmann, Reforming Sex. This is the spirit animating Jennifer Evans’s commentary in the special issue of Queering German history. See Evans, “Introduction,” 371–84. Bonnell, Hunt, and Biernacki, Beyond the Cultural Turn. Butler, “Reanimating the Social,” 47–77. Quataert, “The Politics of Rural Industrialization,” 94. See also Quataert, “Social Insurance.” Quataert, “A Source Analysis in German Women’s History,” 99–121. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy. For the history of masculinity and patriotism, see Hagemann, “Männlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre”; and Hagemann, Revisiting Prussia’s Wars against Napoleon. Quataert, Advocating Dignity; Moyn, The Last Utopia Human Rights in History; Moyn, Christian Human Rights. Quataert and Wildenthal, eds., Routledge History of Human Rights. Orosz, Religious Conflict; O’Donnell, Bridenthal, and Reagin, The Heimat Abroad; O’Donnell, “French and German Women’s Colonial Settlement Movements, 1896-1904,” 92–110; Ritzheimer, “Trash,” Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany; Evans, Life among the Ruins; Smaldone, Confronting Hitler; Rose, “Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! and the Gender of German Pacifism”; and “Place and Politics at the Frankfurt Paulskirche after 1945,” Journal of Urban History 42, no. 1 (January 2016): 145–61. See more at www.NewFascismSyllabus.com and www.GermanStudiesCollaborat ory.org

Bibliography Bonnell, Victoria E., Lynn Avery Hunt, and Richard Biernacki. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Studies on the History of Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Boxer, Marilyn J., and Jean H. Quataert. Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New York: Elsevier, 1978. Butler, Judith. “Reanimating the Social.” In The Future of Social Theory, edited by Nicholas Gane, 47–77. London: Continuum, 2004. Canning, Kathleen. Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Canning, Kathleen, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire, eds. Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s. New York: Berghahn, 2010.

Beginnings, Not Ends • 13 Caplan, Jane. “The Meaning of Gender in German History Rutgers University, 25– 27 April 1986.” German History 4, no. 1 (1987): 36–38. Evans, Jennifer V. Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. “Introduction: Why Queer German History?” German History 34, no. 3 (1 September 2016): 371–84. Grossmann, Atina. Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hagemann, Karen. “Männlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre”: Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preussens. Paderborn: Brill, 2002. ———. Revisiting Prussia’s Wars against Napoleon: History, Culture, and Memory, trans. Pamela Selwyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Hagemann, Karen, and Donna Harsch. “Gendering Central European History: Changing Representations of Women and Gender in Comparison, 1968–2017.” Central European History 51, no. 1 (2018): 114–27. Hagemann, Karen, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Bruhofener, eds. Gendering Post1945 German History: Entanglements. New York: Berghahn, 2019. Leng, Kirsten. Sexual Politics and Feminist Science Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900–1933. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. ———. Christian Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Newton, Judith L., and Mary P. Ryan, and Judith R. Walkowitz. Sex and Class in Women’s History: Essays from Feminist Studies. New York: Routledge, 2013. Orosz, Kenneth. Religious Conflict and the Evolution of Language Policy in German and French Cameroon, 1885-1939. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. O’Donnell, Krista, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Ruth Reagin. The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. ———. “French and German Women’s Colonial Settlement Movements, 18961904.” Historical Reflections 40, no. 1 (2014): 92–110. Quataert, Jean H. Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. ———. “The Politics of Rural Industrialization: Class, Gender, and Collective Protest in the Saxon Oberlausitz of the Late Nineteenth Century.” Central European History 20, no. 2 (1987): 94. ———. “Social Insurance and the Family Work of Female Oberlausitz Home Weavers in the Late 19th Century.” In John C. Fout, German Women in the 19th Century. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984. ———. “A Source Analysis in German Women’s History: Factory Inspectors’ Reports and the Shaping of Working-Class Lives, 1878-1914.” Central European History 16, no. 2 (1983): 99–121. ———. Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813-1916. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. ———. Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Quataert, Jean H., and Karen Hagemann, ed. Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography. New York: Berghahn, 2007.

14 • Kathleen Canning and Jennifer Evans Quataert, Jean H., and Lora Wildenthal, eds., The Routledge History of Human Rights. New York: Routledge, 2019. Ritzheimer, Kara. “Trash,” Censorship, and National Identity in Early TwentiethCentury Germany. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press 2019. Rose, Shelley E. “Place and Politics at the Frankfurt Paulskirche after 1945.” Journal of Urban History 42, no. 1 (January 2016): 145–61. ———. “Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! and the Gender of German Pacifism.” In Women Writing War: From German Colonialism through World War I, edited by Katharina von Hammerstein, Julie Shoults, and Barbara Kosta. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–75. Smaldone, William. Confronting Hitler: German Social Democrats in Defense of the Weimar Republic, 1929-1933. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.

PART I

E E E Negotiating Gender

CHAPTER 1

E E E Strategic Communities Gender Self-Fashioning, Political Dissent, and the Search for Homosexual Rights in Wilhelmine Germany Glenn B. Ramsey

Jean Quataert inspired my scholarly interests in gender and sexuality with her interests in cultural politics and gender performativity. We often discussed Judith Butler’s work and how it applies to a history of (homo)sexuality in the Wilhelmine era, when the search for homosexual rights[GR] began in earnest in the European context. Indeed, between 1890 and 1914, Germany witnessed great transformations in cultural politics that directly addressed gender and sexuality. This chapter examines how cultural transformation proved important not only in changing official responses to the life values of health, the body, and sexuality, but also in developing traditions of public activism for reform. Named for the imperial accession of Wilhelm II in 1888, the Wilhelmine period witnessed a surge of new associational life aimed at shaping public opinion, national legislation, and gendered self-representation through publicized communities often divided across social, cultural, and political interests. One of the distinguishing aspects of this new activism came in the form of the German Life-Reform movement (Lebensreform) with its strategic debate about a “third way,” between party politics and future revolution. New cultural values informed the collective efforts of these groups in seeking limited reforms that would benefit the daily lives and self-expressions of the German people in the present. Focusing on preserving both national and regional cultural traditions and promoting physical rejuvenation, hygienic sexual practices, diet, and healthy integration of body and mind, these diverse, privately organized groups shared motives in restoring an equilibrium between “nature and nurture,” viewed as threatened by the alienating influences of industrialism. Like other Lebensreform advocates, those in the homosexual rights movement (so designated here by its historical context) also contented

18 • Glenn B. Ramsey

themselves with forming small societies, founding journals with limited distribution, and petitioning government deputies across party lines. Their tactics often focused on passing bills that addressed more limited demands, though nationally comprehensive, than either the contemporary socialist or feminist movements, from whom homosexual advocates often drew inspiration. In contrast to the Weimar period (1918–1929), when lesbian and male same-sex periodicals became widespread, male homosexual reformers of the Wilhelmine era restricted themselves to the public enlightenment strategy of publishing brochures and journal articles and staging lectures for an educated public for the purpose of overturning the sodomy law, Paragraph 175, which punished consensual sex acts between males. In a similar but somewhat different context, Marti Lybeck shows how female same-sex desire, the women’s emancipation movement, and gender nonconformity, not sex-crime laws, were instrumental around the same period in shaping identities of those identifying as “female homosexuals” or lesbians.1 Consequently, the experiences of both groups of sexual minorities differed during this period, and only that of male homosexuals, shaped by the sodomy law, will be discussed here in relation to “emancipation.” Similarly, homosexual activists focused their energy on indirect, sustained engagements with an interested “general public,” which logically emerged from the threats of censorship (from the Lex Heinze law) in discussing male homosexuality within more open forums, or those subject to police intervention on behalf of public standards of morality. The more directly political goal of overturning Paragraph 175 stemmed from this central aim of public enlightenment, in petitioning the Reichstag with the names of prominent German intellectuals and officials. This early strategy represented a more abbreviated attempt at “liberation” than what was to come later in the 1920s, in persuading the legislature that Germany’s sodomy law no longer reflected the professional findings of scientific research or the ethical sensibilities of Germany’s cultural elite. In addition to educating public opinion about the new conceptions of same-sex desire, homosexual advocates of the two Wilhelmine groups, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitee (WhK, Scientific-Humanitarian Committee) and the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (GdE, “Community of the Self-Owned”), served a common purpose in also educating homosexuals about their desire, in addition to the political struggle to overturn Paragraph 175. This type of communication among homosexual activists informed those still in the dark about their desire, who felt isolated by society or their families, and who were, subsequently, on the verge of suicide or experiencing public scandal or blackmail. The periodicals of these two groups, the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook

Strategic Communities • 19

for Sexual Intermediates) and Der Eigene (The Self-Owned), provided a relatively anonymous space for literate homosexuals to absorb the views and experiences of other educated, largely middle-class homosexual (and non-homosexual) authors, political activists, and medical professionals. Consequently, readers were given the opportunity to either incorporate the models of self-identity and behavior proposed in these journals’ pages or to construct alternative models and critiques, as well as to associate vicariously or in active membership with a “community” represented in these two journals. This chapter will explore how gender differences in representation of homosexuality between these two groups were employed in their journals, and how these differences led to confrontations over strategy that not only limited chances for cooperation but also established two traditions that opened space for creative tensions that would shape homosexual activism and culture in the years to come. Indeed, I propose that one must look beyond the external political struggle and analyze the specific modes in which these two groups constructed what I call “strategic communities,” not necessarily identifiable with the preexisting homosexual subculture, which had already developed around expanded urban opportunities in bars, nightclubs, and anonymous public spaces. Although these two certainly intersected, the type of “community” articulated in these periodicals served a specific cultural politics, similar to Dena Goodman’s Republic of Letters (1994),2 that involved simultaneously the theoretical fashioning of “homosexual emancipation” and an expanding effort to mobilize elements, both inside and outside the subculture, within politically motivated ranks of the movement for reform. However, as mentioned before[GR] both groups failed to reach a working consensus on a unified strategy or long-term method for sustained coordination, a casualty of their differences over the gender status of homosexual desire that sometimes led to controversial extremes committed by both groups. The only point of agreement remained the need to abolish Paragraph 175, though from alternative perspectives. In addition, while the newly reemergent Socialists, under the leadership of August Bebel in the Reichstag, were willing to support the reform efforts of the homosexual emancipationists, the rest of the German parties, the Nationalists, the Center, and most liberals[GR], not only denied any support but actively spoke against homosexual activism, as a threat to “culture” and Germany’s reputation for martial vigor. As the nation drew closer to international conflict toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the movement found itself paralyzed and isolated after a series of national scandals, by the drive for war, and the need to defend Germany’s imperial aspirations and “manly” character against threats from those “outside.”

20 • Glenn B. Ramsey

Like most of the Life-Reform associations, both groups’ membership numbers were relatively small (from about twenty to just above five hundred active members in Berlin3), and their social audience tended to be neither aristocratic-conservative nor industrial middle-class, but that traditional group of educated, professional bourgeoisie (or Bildungsbürgertum [GR]) who were[GR] now politically and culturally challenged by new technocratic, commercial elites. Similarly, they also shared the vision of regenerating cultural life in the new mass, consumer-oriented society through new political terminologies and aesthetic representations, which in the WhK and the GdE were to mobilize homosexuals for legal reform and social integration. While activists in the WhK championed the scientific model of an innate, gender-inverted homosexuality (or “third sex”), the activists of the GdE promoted a cultural model of masculinized male “friend-love” (Freundesliebe). Both interpretations were presented through journalistic contributions that targeted a popular, educated audience, between elite and working class, in Berlin. While literature is an important part of constructing individual identity, what I designate as “strategic communities,” reiterated through the thematic unity of either aesthetic or scientific representations, played a far greater role not only in structuring each group’s reform agendas but also in their legitimizing efforts as representatives of a socially identifiable homosexual habitus.4 What we have in both cases of the WhK and the GdE is the political employ of science and literature (including art and photography) on behalf of a reform program aimed at instructing, through identifying and delimiting, the “truth” of homosexuality through homosexuals themselves. Self-fashioning is therefore not only an objectifying process through the assumed textual transparency of scientific or artistic reproductions, but at the same time a politicizing process aimed at creating self-awareness that simultaneously extends toward a social awareness, within the reform strategy of “emancipation.” 5 Begun on the first of April 1896, three years before the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intermediates) and one year before the founding of the WhK, Adolf Brand’s journal Der Eigene initially espoused the individualist anarchism of the left Hegelian Max Stirner (1806–56), especially as presented in his 1845 work Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The peerless self and his property), where the individual exercises a priori a sovereignty before all moral or political demands. However, the presentation of Magnus Hirschfeld’s petition to abolish Paragraph 175 before the Reichstag on 19 January 1898, almost one year after the founding of the WhK, prompted the contributors of Der Eigene to openly proclaim a “new series” (Neue Folge), or face, for the journal. In the 1 July 1899 issue, a few months after the publication of Hirschfeld’s

Strategic Communities • 21

first Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (in the late spring of 1899), Der Eigene began to advocate for a national cultural return (“renaissance”) of male homoerotic friendship, in the tradition of the classical Greeks, specifically Winckelmann’s and the Weimar classicists’ readings of that tradition for a German national aesthetic.6 This new program endorsed and sought to expand the effort to overturn Paragraph 175, in favor of age-differentiated, same-sex male relations. Indeed, the championing of these homoerotic friendships already found representation on the editorial board with the membership of Benedict Friedländer, the artist Fidus, and the Stirnerian anarchist John Henry Mackay (pseudonym “Sagitta”). Indeed, Mackay stimulated Brand’s interest in Stirner as the foundation (alongside Nietzsche) for a journal for cultural reform; the two began collaborating in Friedrichshagen, where Brand started publishing and Mackay belonged to a writer’s circle that included anarchists Erich Mühsam and Senna Hoy, along with other original members of Der Eigene, Benedict Friedländer, Franz Evers, Peter Hille, and the artist Fidus.7 By 1904, references to Stirner, or anarchism in general, disappeared in favor of a culturally conservative, radical-nationalist critique: of the women’s movement, Marxism, and modern, industrial society, as signs of decline in the Männerbund ideal (a national culture founded on all-male associations). This about-face in orientation situated Der Eigene between a “cultural” revolution and nationalist reaction, as explained by Claudia Bruns.8 Consequently, with each issue of Der Eigene, critical essays, poems and short stories, and nude photographs and drawings (i.e., Jugendstil images by the artist Fidus) are utilized as a model for male homoerotic desire, proclaimed to be more “chaste” (less controversial) and liberating than Hirschfeld’s scientific model of homosexuality as a “third sex.” In a 1903 issue, an author named “Gotamo,” in an essay entitled “Into the Future!,” criticizes the effeminate homosexuals (of the third-sex variety) and the male prostitutes of the homosexual subculture as unworthy allies for emancipation, as “ethically inferior” people.9 Though the authors in Der Eigene criticized the effeminate image of a third sex, most, like Gotamo, embraced Hirschfeld’s general characterization of sexual desire as an innate gradation from exclusive heterosexuality to homosexuality, with a bisexual median point.10 Indeed, the members of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, the political association representing the journal, promoted bisexuality as the biological foundation of social and cultural manifestations for their ideal of friend-love. The search for a “renaissance” of all-male, nationalist aesthetics comes through most clearly in the essays in Der Eigene, which advance artistic and literary traditions of male friend-love.11 In a four-part essay by Dr. Otto Kiefer, entitled “The Beautiful Male Youth in the Fine Arts of

22 • Glenn B. Ramsey

All Times,” the modern praise of female beauty, extending back to the troubadours of the Middle Ages, contrasts unfavorably with the older, Hellenic representation of male youthful beauty, rediscovered in Greek culture via Winckelmann and Schiller.12 According to Kiefer, this Hellenic aesthetic tradition owed its origins to the classical Greeks’ praise of erotic friendships between a man and a youth, as the highest form of culturally productive relations between males. Following Winckelmann, the author praises the sculptures of Praxiteles and, in particular, the Apollo Belvedere as the height of perfection in portraying the sensuality of the youthful, athletic male form.13 In a similar article, in praise of the artist Fidus, Hans Bethge highlights his subject’s “Nordic” feeling for the German landscape, his sense of nostalgia for a past “Germania” (Germanentum), and, above all, his representation of the purity of erotic, nude youth, both male and female, as Life-Reform symbols of cultural rejuvenation.14 Fidus was a particular favorite of Der Eigene, even drawing an image of a nude male youth holding a palm branch aloft as the frontispiece of the issue announcing the founding of the GdE,15 and the artist often contributed his work to other Life-Reform journals, such as Die Schönheit (Beauty), a heterosexually-oriented journal. The photographs, paintings, and literary pieces in Der Eigene function as part of the GdE’s promised return to an aesthetics of love between men and male youths. The pictures of nude male adolescents outdoors, by the shores of Berlin’s many surrounding lakes, portray a new kind of modern consumption of erotic nudity, one that titillates and educates at the same time about sexual and hygienic bodily form. The photos invite the observer to an intimate viewing of unclothed, young male bodies, while stimulating the sense of propriety that one is appreciating the beauty of human form and the healthy, natural effects of exercise, fresh air, and physical vitality. Whether in photos, paintings, or literature, the images of nudes in the journals serve as a metaphor for the type of cultural, moral rejuvenation shared by many of the Life-Reform groups, particularly those for Freikörperkultur (public, nude bathing and sport), the youth movement (the Wandervogel), and for Naturheilkunde (natural healing methods). They also promote a new, social-hygienic approach to sexual expression, in playing to sensual desire in ways that delimit “excesses” through pedagogic claims of “natural” representation. For example, in a photo by Lucien von Römer, entitled Boxer (1903) [GR], found in the March 1903 issue of Der Eigene, a nude adolescent male with well-defined muscles is turned slightly to his left with his fists raised before his face; however, his fully-nude frontal body faces the viewer boldly against a dark backdrop, as he stands on a white bedsheet.16 The photo leaves the impression of a lover’s desire to immortalize his

Strategic Communities • 23

subject’s youth in a form justified by the athletic pose of a classical male youth, which delimits pornographic indulgence. Indeed, in the short stories, often accompanied with paintings of older and younger male lovers, notably those like “Morgendämmerung” (Dawn) by Sascha Schneider,17 the stress in the encounters between the two characters lies in the sudden recognition of a psychic, almost spiritual congruity and attachment, for which nudity serves only as attractive impulse (or Reizmaterial). In “Stuermende See” (Stormy Lake), by H. G. in the January 1905 issue of Der Eigene, an eighteen-year-old youth, named Hans Jürgen, meets an older stranger, a writer in his midthirties named Wolf Schwab, while swimming nude early one morning in the Ostsee during early Spring. Hans and Wolf then swim out to an island where they become more acquainted and realize that their long isolation from life’s mysteries, love and desire, are finally over, the boy finding answers in his quest for an understanding comrade and the older man fulfilling his desire to rediscover youthful vitality and innocence. As a storm approaches one day, and the youth refuses to neglect his early morning swim, the older man swims out to save Hans from drowning, but they both die joyfully in each other’s embrace as they realize that they lack the strength to return to shore.18 While sentimental, these stories no doubt reflected painful experiences of male same-sex desire in an age of public isolation and persecution, in ways that ennobled a desire that, though denounced as “shameful,” seemed all the more beautiful for its transience as “love that dared not speak its name.” Consequently, the journal’s use of aesthetics as cultural critique operated [GR] in a broad struggle for a rediscovery of male friend-love and appreciation for male beauty, felt by the members of the GdE to have been expelled from the German cultural tradition by an “effeminized” modern society and mass consumer culture, the chief effects of Paragraph 175’s continuing existence. Chad Ross in Naked Germany (2005) makes a similar case in the opposition between urban, modern culture and the national (and racial) return to sexual purity and health for both young men and women in the Freikörperkultur [GR](“free body culture,” or nudism) that began around the same time in Germany and included members of the GdE, Heinrich Pudor and Karl Vanselow.19 To abolish the German sodomy law meant to open the road for further reforms in favor of men’s culture, where youthful male sexuality would no longer be constrained toward traditional outlets of female prostitution or early marriage, but placed at the service of the German nation in the educative outlet of same-sex, male friend-love.20 Consequently, Der Eigene’s 1899 change to a more specific cultural critique than individualist anarchism holds equal, if not more, significance than its open avowal of interest in

24 • Glenn B. Ramsey

the strictly legal problems of homosexuality, which took place already in the late summer issue of 1898. Taking a scientific approach to same-sex desire, the Wissenschaftlichhumanitäres Komitee, founded in May 1897, also intended its enlightenment efforts to impact debate not only in the Reichstag, among politicians, but among the educated, to bring positive changes in public opinion. Robert Beachy in Gay Berlin (2014) as well as Robert Tobin in Peripheral Desires (2015) tend to emphasize the prescient resilience of Magnus Hirschfeld’s theories than those of the GdE, which they shade as provocative, outmoded, and largely reactionary to the “modern” belief in homosexuality as innate and “gender-inverted,” or “queer.”21 However, similar to the reading of lesbian magazines in distilling a new “same-sex” identity, as detailed by Laurie Marhoefer in Sex and the Weimar Republic (2015), the journal Der Eigene cannot be characterized as predominantly “anti-modern” or “reactionary,” but rather as activating an older model of friend-love that had been reread by the GdE in an equally modern and positive vein, as I have suggested.22 Granted that the GdE took a radical nationalist line that catered to anti-feminism, antisemitism [GR], and anti-Marxism, these were nonetheless all part of contemporaneous strands of influential radical-nationalist thought (irreducible to fascism or Nazism),23 and in arguing against gender inversion, the GdE actually proposed a fundamentally different vision of male same-sex desire as between men loving adolescent males, not the heteronormative idea of male desire for other males as a feminine instinct. In today’s world, both ideas of gender inversion (effeminacy) and friend-love (or, more generally, masculinism) occupy a long-standing space in gay men’s culture, for good or bad. Therefore, we must see the Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitee and the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen as creative efforts to strategize “emancipation,” through giving and disseminating an identity to a desire that in the end failed to “stick,” which left paths open for future political activism to reshape same-sex culture as an ongoing social experiment of “selfliberation” (or refashioning). Magnus Hirschfeld, himself a licensed physician, began his literary career in just this mode as a “Life-Reformer,” writing mostly against alcohol consumption and for nudism and herbal medicine, and turned to the subject of homosexuality, in Sappho und Sokrates (1896), after the Oscar Wilde trials of May 1895 and the suicide of a patient, a young lieutenant from Magdeburg.24 Shortly after settling his new practice in Charlottenburg, Hirschfeld invited his publisher Max Spohr and Eduard Oberg, a jurist, to his apartment for establishing an organization that promoted new scientific “discoveries” about homosexuality for legal reform.25 Though the only homosexual among the three founding mem-

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bers, Hirschfeld never publicly disclosed his sexuality for fear of losing his medical practice, and he stressed that the new organization would be open to both heterosexuals and homosexuals. Aided by financial support from a fourth member, Franz Josef von Bülow, and a scion of the Hohenzollern family, Prinz Georg von Preußen,26 the WhK [GR], as its first action, launched a petition to decriminalize consensual sexual relations between adult men. By December 189727 the petition had gathered signatures of legal, government, and medical state officials, physicians, professors, civil servants, artists, and politicians, most notably Karl Kautsky and August Bebel of the SPD, the latter presenting the petition before the Reichstag in January 1898.28 From the viewpoints expressed by experts in scientific, juridical, and cultural fields, which accompanied their signatures, Hirschfeld struck upon the idea of a periodical that would present some of the latest scientific findings about sexual intermediates in general (including transvestitism and hermaphroditism), and homosexuality in particular.29 Consequently, the first Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen appeared in January 1899 as the official organ of the WhK and, by the second year, as edited by Magnus Hirschfeld himself.30 In addition to the scientific essays on male and female homosexuality, the Jahrbuch included treatises on the natural origins of sexual intermediacy in general, notably by the Monist, Darwinian Ernst Haeckel, anthropological studies on same-sex desire in non-European cultures, historical surveys of homosexuality [GR] in the legal traditions of Europe, studies of prominent literary and historical homosexual [GR] figures, and the autobiographies of male and female homosexuals. In “Gonochorism and Hermaphroditism,” Haeckel argues against scientists who view sex as fundamental to the origins of organic life, by clarifying that unicellular organisms are originally sexless.31 From this standpoint, Haeckel then proceeds to explain the appearance of hermaphroditism among humans as proceeding from an original fetal sexual intermediacy, which can physically manifest later in males with lactating breasts (gynecomastia), a fissured penis and scrotal sac (hypospadias), and undescended testicles (or cryptorchidism). To illustrate his argument, he uses photographs from his collection, of an Athenian, a man from Ceylon, and a Singhalese, all of whom display breasts and penises (as hermaphroditic figures). From a similar line in anthropological cases, Dr. Ferdinand Karsch upholds the natural phenomena of sexual intermediacy among tribal, non-European peoples, with a survey of the linkage between crossedsex behavior (habitus) and same-sex desire among African, Malaysian, Polynesian, and Native American peoples. Dr. Karsch cites among the last group of peoples the well-documented tradition of the berdache, male individuals raised as females to serve the dual social roles of wife and

26 • Glenn B. Ramsey

domestic servant.32 At the end of the essay, he takes issue with Elisar von Kupffer over “masculine” friend-love, Lieblingminne, stating that Ulrichs himself conceded the plausibility of masculine Urnings.33 Finally, Karsch claims that the “natural,” anthropological evidence of effeminate males and masculine females among tribal cultures lends equal, if not more, credibility to Hirschfeld’s championing the notion of a “third sex” for homosexuality, a conclusion that interprets non-European evidence outside of its particular cultural context. Alongside the anthropological argument for same-sex desire as gender inversion, Numa Praetorius, a pseudonym for a doctor of jurisprudence, also contributed a historical, legal survey of classical and European responses to male (and female) homosexuality in the journal’s first volume.34 Starting with the “Asiatic peoples” (Jews, Scythians, and Persians), of whom only Judaic law prohibited same-sex relations between men, he covers classical Greece and Rome, the largely condemnatory Middle Ages, the reform of penalties for “sodomy” during the age of Enlightenment, and the post-Napoleonic era, where countries like France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands decriminalized male same-sex behavior, except in cases of public indecency, assault, and seduction of minors. Praetorius makes the point that anal sex (“sodomy”) is not typical of homosexual behavior, since even the Greeks and Romans allegedly prosecuted it under the legal concept of “stuprum,” a point that has been contradicted by subsequent research that shows Greco-Roman legal traditions prosecuting assault and public scandal, not the behavior itself. In addition, Praetorius shows the legal trends already underway toward decriminalizing “sodomy” on the condition of the protection of male minors, or youth, a point that would serve as one of the most contentious points of debate for reform efforts in Germany. While extending the evidence for a “third sex” into past historical eras and across geographical boundaries, into the customs of peoples deemed “closer to nature” than modern industrial Europe, the journal also employed individual, biographical evidence for the scientific correlation between same-sex behavior and same-sex desire. In the essay “From the Spiritual Life [Seelenleben] of Graf Platen,” Ludwig Frey reviews the private relations between the poet and male friends, for whom Platen could never express his true desire, as revealed in the latest publication (1896) of Platen’s diaries.35 Frey presents the poet’s life as the tragic experience of a typical Urning, a male homosexual who, according to Frey, preferred “female” pastimes to “male” ones and showed an effeminate constitution. Ultimately, Platen’s inability to stay intimate with male friends illustrates for Frey the fundamental difference between friendship (friend-love) and erotic attraction, in a swipe at those like Brand, Friedländer, and Kupffer

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of the GdE, who argued for male friendship as a social expression of male same-sex desire. In light of this ideological, gendered divide between the two emancipationist groups, and as argued in an edited volume by Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog, entitled After The History of Sexuality (2012), historians of sexuality must forget the chronology and one-way power-valence of discourse around “sexuality,” as presented in earlier “classical” interpretations of Foucault’s monumental introduction to his History of Sexuality (1978).36 Rather, one must look at the specific contestations around identities that indicate the calling into being of different subjectivities around a “sexuality” that reading Foucault directly might otherwise overlook or minimize. This latter, traditional mode of reading Foucault suggests a monolithic discursive limit that manifests as “resistance” against, rather than as a polyvalent resistance around a concept that never fully stabilizes. The very fact of this failure to stabilize concepts about same-sex desire points to, by allowing for, its historicization and the possibilities of different modes of political activism. Often the two emancipationist groups gave media space to each other in their respective journals, despite the ideological chasm between them. Consequently, one sees autobiographies, like “The Truth About Me: The Autobiography of a Contrary-Sexed Person,” where the childhood experiences of a “tomboy” are employed to display the “truth” of same-sex desire (in this case, a lesbian) as gender inversion,37 while in Otto Kiefer’s historical study of the erotic relations between the Roman emperor Hadrian and his Greek slave-boy, Antinous,38 and in Max Katte’s essay on “virile” homosexuals, the Jahrbuch, like Der Eigene, gives space to masculinist views of friend-love that contradict the Jahrbuch’s main line of homosexual representation.39 Theoretically, the WhK [GR]always remained true to the model of homosexuality defined in the tradition of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825– 1895), despite Hirschfeld’s repeated concessions about a gradated spectrum of sexual desire, with heterosexual and homosexual as opposite, “ideal” poles. For Hirschfeld, homosexuality was an innate desire that always bore some traceable psycho-physiological relationship to hermaphroditism, in being marked by subtle but distinctive opposite-sex character traits (“gender inversion”).40 However, many who had no interest in this theoretical question, or even opposed it, nevertheless joined the WhK [GR], notably Benedict Friedländer of the GdE, since the group was organized as an effective political organization for legal reform, even though the WhK, in its statutes, denied any political or confessional alliances.41 Indeed, in addition to being open for heterosexual, as well as homosexual, members, the organization sought to remain politically neutral in order to convince politicians and the daily press of

28 • Glenn B. Ramsey

the WhK’s [GR] “objective” commitment to changing public opinion through science. In keeping with this tradition, and in contrast to the GdE’s [GR] lack of formal structure (aside from its editorial staff), the WhK [GR] defined itself as a parliamentary association (Verein)42 with an executive committee of seven members, with at least three from the scientific disciplines, one from the legal practices, and three members-at-large.43 However, despite all the scientific and juridical arguments that could be mustered, the WhK’s efforts often faltered before judges and Reichstag deputies, who, constantly dismissive of changing opinions in the press and among prominent public figures, continued to endorse arguments of Christian moral tradition, the seduction of youth, the licentiousness of scientific writings about homosexuality before “the masses,” and a new argument, the lack of professional consensus on the origins of male same-sex desire. When the petition was originally presented before the Reichstag in January 1898, August Bebel (of the SPD) argued that the sodomy law should be overturned, since if the government were serious about enforcement, then new prisons in Berlin alone would have to be built for those known as homosexuals by the police.44 In counterargument, the Center Party deputy, Pastor Schall, referred to the Old Testament and Paul’s letter to the Romans, as proof of dangers to public (i.e., Christian) morality posed by legalizing male homosexuality.45 At another trial on the legality of the petition under the Lex Heinze law against “indecent” publications, conservative deputy Himburg argued that if homosexuality were indeed a psychological disturbance, that still does not remove its liability for criminal prosecution, even if, as was current practice, a forensic expert could prove the accused to be ruled by “maniacal” erotic impulses, thereby removing accountability (Rechnungsfähigkeit). That linkage, he asserted, had to be established in each individual case and did not warrant reform of the sodomy law itself.46 Despite the best efforts of Bebel and the National-Liberal deputy, Dr. med. Kruse-Norderney, to support the petition, the Reichstag voted overwhelmingly to hand the petition over to a commission for further discussion, and not to open any further debate on the issue before the Reichstag plenum.47 When the petition returned to the Reichstag for debate, six years later (on 31 May 1905),48 a lively discussion [GR] ensued between two of the deputies, Thiele of the SPD, in support of plenum discussion, and the Center Party deputy Dr. Thaler, against. The latter’s arguments focused on the lack of consensus among scientific authorities on the status of homosexuality: was it an inheritable or acquired illness or a natural anomaly predetermined during embryological development?49 From the opposition’s arguments, which prevented sending the petition to the chancellor

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for recommendation,50 one can gather that despite “unbiased,” neutral claims of science for social reform, when it came to homosexuality, science was not above the law,51 or the public’s sense of decency and moral duty to protect male youth from seduction. This juridical linkage between homosexuality and public mores became stronger as the social- and racial-hygienic ties between “national health” imperatives and hegemonic traditions of middle-class “respectability” were increasingly affirmed in combating the decline in numbers and, supposedly, genetic quality of the German population.52 The question of representation, never too far from the surface among the homosexual emancipationist groups, would soon resurface in an internal struggle for political control over the object of debate and tactical routes to reform. In the autumn of 1906, from September to 14 October, Benedict Friedländer, as leader of the committee for the WhK’s propaganda distribution (or Arbeitsausschuß), began an internal assault, along with other sympathizers of the GdE, on the WhK’s [GR] scientific theories of homosexuality.53 Already in the 1906 issue of the Jahrbuch, Friedländer contributed an article, a “Critique of the New Proposals for the Amendment of §175 [GR],” which argued against the WhK’s [GR] main line: that reform should start from the standpoint of “personal freedom,” not medicine; that male prostitution should be decriminalized, since women are allowed by the state to sell their bodies (from economic motives) but males are not; and that the legal standard for a sexual “age of consent” is impractical, given that only education can protect youth from sexual dangers and that females, by tradition, often begin courtship during early adolescence.54 In effect, those around Friedländer were pushing for a “sexual bill of rights” that demanded self-determination in sexual matters for young people, a position that the KDP (Communist Party of Germany) would later espouse in collaboration with the WhK during the Weimar period. By January 1907 a circular went throughout the ranks of the WhK, in the name of “Secession,” in which Friedländer, a long-standing member of the WhK’s [GR] executive committee [GR], protested the dominance of doctors in the movement as an opportunistic strategy to support the one-sided theory of homosexuals as effeminate, “intermediate” beings, a tactic aimed at the “pity” of government representatives for abolishing Paragraph 175.55 This circular provoked an emergency general assembly on 17 February 1907, which led to clarification of the WhK’s [GR] strategic commitment to scientific discoveries of male homosexuality, the dissolution of the Arbeitsausschuß, and organizational support for the seven-member executive board (Vorstand) through a new reserve assembly of twenty-eight elected officers (Obmännerkollegium), from which to

30 • Glenn B. Ramsey

select leaders.56 The only damage to the WhK [GR] from the Secession fiasco amounted to a loss of 1,000 Marks [GR] in annual contributions, mostly from Friedländer’s own donations.57 Nothing further came of the Secession; Friedländer died by suicide [GR] on 22 June 1908, while confined in a hospital in Schöneberg for colon cancer.58 Though Hirschfeld could successfully limit the disruptive forces within the WhK’s leadership, he would soon become personally embroiled in a public, external scrutiny of his “humanitarian” motives. While the disturbances within the WhK were taking place, another, national scandal had begun to break in the newspapers concerning Maximilian Harden’s accusations, in the Social-Democratic journal Die Zukunft (The Future), of homosexuality among the Kaiser’s close friend and adviser, Prince Philip zu Eulenburg. Entangled in its own struggles, the WhK [GR] originally ignored the scandal until the 1 July 1907 issue of the Monatsbericht, when Hirschfeld reiterated in the monthly report before the onset of the trials that the WhK had always supported the long, arduous work of scientific, public enlightenment, as opposed to the opportunistic and harmful tactic of public outing, which had often been espoused by Adolf Brand. However, relating a purge of the Potsdam regiment (Gardes des Corps) in connection with the scandal, namely Major Count Johannes zu Lynar, commander of the Crown Prince’s Regiment, on suspicions of homosexuality, Hirschfeld speculated, alongside cited statements from jurists, that these revelations might inspire a change of opinion and direct personal interest by the Kaiser in favor of reforming Paragraph 175.59 Thus, while Hirschfeld did not originally endorse the actions of Harden, he was quite eager to see, if not influence, some positive gain for the reform struggle as a result of public revelations, especially since Eulenburg and the “Liebenburg Circle” were widely known to be the emperor’s most trusted friends.60 Dubbed the Hofaffäre (Court Affair), the series of Moltke-Harden-Eulenburg trials of 1908–1909 constituted not only the most damaging scandal of the Wilhelmine regime, but inspired a national “witch-hunt” to ferret out those suspected of forming some secret “homosexual international,” threatening the government from within the conservative, noble ranks of the German officer and diplomatic corps. In this capacity, the public trials, beginning with Moltke’s against Harden for libel in October 1907, directly engulfed the nascent homosexual rights movement. Already in the first trial, as published in the monthly report of 1 November 1907, Hirschfeld’s testimony as forensic expert affirmed, for Harden’s defense, Moltke’s alleged homosexuality. Based on an “objective” diagnosis, Hirschfeld’s view was then corroborated by statements from Moltke’s exwife, that her former husband met the three main points of being “cool”

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toward members of the opposite sex (the reason for their divorce), being passionate for members of the same sex (the correspondence between Moltke and Eulenburg), and possessing undeniable psychological and physical traits of male effeminacy.61 As a result of Hirschfeld’s intervention, Harden was acquitted of libel, but the Kaiser, displeased by the court’s decision, urged an appeal in a second trial, from December 1907 to January 1908, in which Moltke’s ex-wife retracted her statements, leading to Harden’s conviction of libel and four months imprisonment.62 After Hirschfeld consequently withdrew his “diagnosis,” press reactions from formerly supportive newspapers were merciless in their criticisms of Hirschfeld’s dissecting the personality of Moltke and for aiding Harden’s political schemes in the self-serving practice of homosexual “agitation.” The GdE soon became entangled in the matter through its chairman and editor of Der Eigene, Adolf Brand. Brand had begun as early as 1904 to “out” political figures, such as the Center Party deputy, Chaplain Dasbach, for which Brand was imprisoned for two months,63 and in September 1907 he had accused the chancellor himself of being homosexual.64 In the following trial for libel against Brand for accusing Chancellor Bülow of homosexuality, the leader of the GdE had expected Hirschfeld to intercede as expert witness for the chancellor’s “disposition,” a request that Hirschfeld declined, subsequently landing Brand in prison for eighteen months.65 Combined with the negative involvement of both emancipationist groups, the protracted nature of the trials, postponed (indefinitely) after July 1908 by Eulenburg’s ill health,66 exhausted the nation’s patience with debating homosexuality for the time being. In relation to the issue of Paragraph 175, the SPD, the WhK’s [GR] only open and originally supportive party in the Reichstag, began to distance itself from its formerly positive stance. On 29 November 1907 SPD deputy August Bebel, now aged and in ill health, spoke on the subject of reform in light of the new “camarilla affair,” reiterating his position since 1898, but openly accepting, for the first time, his party’s “Marxist” tendency to view homosexuality as a sign of (bourgeois) social decay. In addition, the government, for the first time, seriously considered strengthening the sodomy law to include relations between women,67 and the financial support of the WhK drastically declined, forcing the Jahrbuch and the Monatsbericht to be combined into a single, shortened quarterly format (Vierteljahrsberichte des WhK).68 With Brand’s imprisonment for one and half years, the journal Der Eigene was temporarily shut down until after the November Revolution, in 1919. The WhK [GR] itself spent the next ten years controlling the damage to its finances and trying to win back public opinion for renewed discussion of the injustices caused by Paragraph 175.

32 • Glenn B. Ramsey

In assessing the development and activities of the GdE and the WhK in the context of Wilhelmine reform, their efforts for overturning Paragraph 175 reflect the politically limited goals of the larger phenomenon of the German Life-Reform movement. While the WhK [GR] addressed same-sex desire from the scientific viewpoint of sexual intermediacy, a biological “third sex,” the GdE drew on an older, national aesthetic of classical male Eros, or friend-love, as it was transmitted in German cultural traditions since Winckelmann and Weimar classicism. Equally different in political orientation, the GdE shifted, after 1900, from an originally anarcho-individualist standpoint to an increasingly radical nationalist framework of friend-love (as a national cultural factor), while the WhK tended toward reformist social democracy through its leader, Hirschfeld, and the early support from Bebel and the SPD. However, like the Life-Reform movement in general, both groups rejected any official party (or confessional) affiliation. Their strategies and impact for reform though differed: the GdE insisted on a broad cultural, aesthetic program of promoting classical Hellenism in the service of a bisexual model of erotic male comradeship and pedagogy, in which age-differentiated relations played a key role; the WhK stressed utilizing favorable scientific research on male homosexuality to influence the public, in general, and Reichstag deputies and government officials, in particular, for positive but limited reform (in favor of adult male, consensual relations). Their membership numbers and organizational structures reflected this differing perspective on tactics. [GR] The GdE’s perspective stressed a diffuse influence on culture, starting with a “select” class of artists and literati, while the WhK’s perspective stressed a factual, propaganda impact on public opinion (the juridical argument of “the people’s sense of morality”) and their legislative “representatives.” [GR] The latter strategy found expression in the predominance of medical, scientific, and legal professionals in the WhK’s [GR] executive and in the pages of its journal. From brochures, public lectures, the (re)presentations of homosexual “subjects,” and the signatures of cultural and official leaders in support of abolishing Germany’s sodomy law, the WhK [GR] hoped to influence not only public opinion but also the terms of public debate about the nature and social relevance of (male) same-sex desire. This imperative appears nowhere more openly than in the attempts by the Secession, led by Friedländer in support of the GdE [GR], to challenge the domination of the WhK’s [GR] leadership by medical figures and its main ideological line by the image of (male) homosexuality as gender inversion. Maintaining his ideological and tactical distance from such “extreme” wings of the movement, Hirschfeld managed to ride the storm of internal opposition by reorganizing the WhK [GR] with a collective pool of reliable executive

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members (an electoral Obmännerkollegium) and the reiteration of the WhK’s programmatic commitment to the findings of scientific research. However, beyond the WhK’s [GR] intentions and control, the national scandals of the 1907–1909 Eulenburg-Harden-Moltke trials, which engulfed both emancipation groups, revealed the extent of the lack of ideological control over the socially disruptive and manipulative power of the concept of homosexuality. While Hirschfeld denied the politically “lazy” and detrimental tactic of “outing” officials, embraced by Adolf Brand of the GdE, he did take advantage nonetheless of the trial against Moltke to advance his scientific credentials on the subject of homosexuality; this proved to be a step that, after the government’s intervention in a forced appeal, backfired against the objective credibility of the WhK’s [GR] work and which Hirschfeld retracted, in refusing to testify on behalf of Adolf Brand’s charges against Chancellor Bülow. Left in decline by national anxieties and hostility over further debate of homosexuality, the GdE [GR] and the WhK [GR] remained in a position of retrenchment, as the nation increasingly sped toward further bellicose international relations after cleaning up its own diplomatic and military houses. Not until war and defeat had swept away the imperial eagle, always watchful over the nation’s morals, did the homosexual reform struggle reemerge in a less constrained but more unpredictable context of debate among “the masses,” whose leadership would soon be up for grabs after the German Revolution of 1918.

Glenn B. Ramsey received his bachelor’s (1991) in history at what was then Memphis State University, Ramsey then obtained his master’s (1994) and doctoral (2004) degrees at Binghamton University (SUNY), where he studied modern German history under Jean H. Quataert. Since 2005 he has worked as an adjunct instructor in the History Department at University of Memphis (formerly Memphis State University). He has published for such journals as the Journal of the History of Sexuality (vol. 17, no. 1, January 2008) and Political Affairs. He is currently pursuing a degree in education.

Notes 1. Lybeck, Desiring Emancipation. 2. Goodman, Republic of Letters. 3. Keilson-Lauritz, Die Geschichte der eigenen Geschichte, 96; Herzer, Magnus Hirschfeld, 115. 4. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 57. Certeau sums up Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, as that form of being, called “subjectivity,” which mediates be-

34 • Glenn B. Ramsey

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

tween the acquiring of a particular knowledge and its practice by the body and its gestures, in the formation of a new identity. Claudia Bruns, “‘Ihr Männer, seid Männer!’—Maskulinistische Positionen zwischen Revolution und Reaktion,” Politiken in Bewegung, eds. Pretzel and Weiß, 36–37. Tobin, Peripheral Desires, 67–68, 76. Marita Keilson-Lauritz, Emanzipation hinter der Weltstadt: Adolf Brand und die Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Berlin: Müggel-Verlag, 2000), 11–12; KeilsonLauritz, Die Geschichte der eigenen Geschichte, 64, 66; Walter Fähnders, “Anarchism and Homosexuality in Wilhelmine Germany: Senna Hoy, Erich Mühsam, John Henry Mackay,” in Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left, eds. Hekma, Oosterhuis, and Steakley, 139; Dr. Hans Bethge, “Fidus,” Der Eigene 4, no. 6 (1903): 421. Bruns, “‘Ihr Männer, seid Männer!,’” 33–34. Gotamo, “In die Zukunft,” Der Eigene 4, no. 1 (1903): 64–73. Ibid., 71; Adolf Brand, “§ 175 des Reichs-Straf-Gesetzbuches und seine richtige Auslegung,” Der Eigene 3, nos. 8–9 (1899): 279–80; Eduard von Mayer, “Männliche Kultur. Ein Stück Zukunftsmusik,” Der Eigene 4, no. 1 (1903): 46–59; Johannes Gaulke, “Die Homoerotik in der Weltliteratur,” Der Eigene 4, no. 2 (1903): 120–33; Dr. Lucifer, “Zur Erziehung des homosexuell veranlagten Knaben,” Der Eigene 4, no. 3 (1903): 216–18; see also a favorable review of volume 1 of the fifth Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen by Eduard Bertz, in Der Eigene 4, no. 7 (1903): 481–84. Bruns, “‘Ihr Männer, seid Männer!,’” 32. Dr. Otto Kiefer, “Der schöne Jüngling in der bildenden Kunst aller Zeiten: 1. Im Altertum,” Der Eigene 4, no. 1 (1903): 13–15. Ibid., 19–20. Hans Bethge, “Fidus,” Der Eigene 4, no. 6 (1903): 419–23. Fidus, “Die Gemeinschaft der Eigenen,” Der Eigene 4, no. 5 (1903): frontispiece. Lucien von Römer, Der Boxer (photo), Der Eigene 4, no. 3 (1903): 203. Sascha Schneider, “Morgendämmerung” (painting), Der Eigene 5, no. 1 (1905): 6. H. G., “Stuermende See,” Der Eigene 5, no. 1 (1905): 4–9. Ross, Naked Germany; Beachy, Gay Berlin, 103. Bab, “Frauenbewegung,” Der Eigene 4, no. 6 (1903): 406. Beachy, Gay Berlin, 117–18; Tobin, Peripheral Desires, 110. Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic, 58, 64. Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 3–4. Magnus Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1905-06,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen VIII (1906): 890; Hirschfeld, Von einst bis jetzt: Geschichte einer homosexuellen Bewegung, 1897-1922, introduction and afterword by Manfred Herzer and James Steakley (Berlin: Verlag von rosa Winkel [1922] 1986), 48, 50; Herzer, Magnus Hirschfeld, 94–95. Hirschfeld, Von einst bis jetzt, 53–54. Hirschfeld, Von einst bis jetzt, 54; “Jahresbericht 1905-06,” 891. Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1905-06,” 892.

Strategic Communities • 35 28. Hirschfeld, “Petition an die gesetzgebenden Körperschaften des deutschen Reiches behufs Abänderung des § 175 des R.-St.-G.-B. und die sich daran anschliessenden Reichstags-Verhandlungen,” JfsZ I (1899): 252, 272. 29. Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1905-06,” 894. 30. JfsZ II (1900), title page. 31. Ernst Haeckel, “Gonochorismus und Hermaphrodismus. Ein Beitrag zur Lehre von den Geschlechts-Umwandlungen (Metaptosen),” JfsZ XIII, no. 3 (1913): 259–87. 32. Dr. F. Karsch, “Uranismus oder Päderastie und Tribadie bei den Naturvölker,” JfsZ III (1901): 72–201. 33. Karsch, “Uranismus oder Päderastie,” 181. 34. Dr. Jur. Numa Praetorius, “Die strafrechtlichen Bestimmungen gegen den gleichgeschlechtlichen Verkehr historisch und kritisch dargestellt,” JfsZ I (1899): 97–158. 35. Ludwig Frey, “Aus dem Seelenleben des Grafen Platen,” JfsZ I (1899): 159–214. 36. Spector, Puff, and Herzog, eds., After The History of Sexuality, 5. 37. E. Krause, “Die Wahrheit über mich. Selbstbiographie einer Konträrsexuellen,” JfsZ III (1901): 292–307. 38. Dr. Otto Kiefer, “Hadrian und Antinous,” JfsZ VIII (1906): 565–82. 39. Dr. Phil. Max Katte, “Die virile Homosexuellen,” JfsZ VII, no. 1 (1905): 85–106. 40. Beachy, Gay Berlin, 88; Tobin, Peripheral Desires, 94–97. 41. Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1904-1905,” JfsZ VII, no. 2 (1905): 1053–54. 42. Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1905-06,” JfsZ VIII (1906): 891 (footnote 1). 43. Monatsbericht des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, III, no. 11 (1904): 1. 44. Hirschfeld, “Petition,” JfsZ I (1899): 273–74. 45. Hirschfeld, “Petition,” 269, 275. 46. Ibid., 278–79. 47. Ibid., 277. 48. Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1904-05,” 971–73. 49. Ibid., 997–98. 50. Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1904-5,” 1047–50. 51. Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1903-04,” 683, 694–97. 52. Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1904-05,” 1013–14. 53. Monatsbericht V, nos. 8–9 (1906): 172; Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1906-08,” JfsZ IX (1908): 630. 54. Friedländer, “Kritik der neueren Vorschläge zur Abänderung des § 175,” JfsZ VIII (1906): 301–49. 55. Monatsbericht VI, no. 4 (1907): 62. 56. Monatsbericht VI, no. 5 (1907): 85–88. 57. Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1906-08,” JfsZ IX (1908), 630. 58. Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1906-08,” JfsZ IX (1908): 629–30, 663; Monatsbericht VI, no. 5, 88–90. 59. Monatsbericht VI, no. 5, 129–30. 60. Hull, Entourage, 45, 52–53. 61. Monatsbericht VI, no. 11 (1907): 213–14. 62. Hull, Entourage, 138; Hirschfeld, “Jahresbericht 1906-08, JfsZ IX (1908): 650. 63. Hirschfeld, Von einst bis jetzt, 101–2.

36 • Glenn B. Ramsey 64. Monatsbericht VI, no. 11 (1907): 218. 65. Adolf Brand, “Unser Bekenntnis zur Republik,” Der Eigene 11, no. 4 (1926): 100; Brand, “Gefährliche Polizeilisten,” Der Eigene 11, no. 9 (1927): 275–77, 281–82; and Der Eigene 11, no. 10 (1927): 313–16. 66. Hirschfeld, “Einleitung und Situationsbericht,” JfsZ X, no. 1 (1909): 17–18; Hull, Entourage, 138. 67. Ibid., 633–34, 650. 68. Hirschfeld, “Einleitung und Situations–Bericht, JfsZ X, no. 1 (1909): 27–29.

Bibliography Beachy, Robert. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. New York: Knopf, 2014. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Stephen Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Hekma, Gert, Harry Oosterhuis, and James Steakley, eds. Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1995. Herzer, Manfred. Magnus Hirschfeld: Leben und Werk eines jüdischen, schwulen und sozialistischen Sexologen. Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript Verlag, 2001. Hull, Isabel. The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Keilson-Lauritz, Marita. Die Geschichte der eigenen Geschichte: Literatur und Literaturkritik in den Anfängen der Schwulenbewegung. Berlin, Verlag Rosa Winkel, 1997. Lybeck, Marti M. Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890-1933. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014. Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2015. Mohler, Armin. Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918-1932: Ein Handbuch. Graz: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1999. Pretzel, Andreas, and Volker Weiß, eds. Politiken in Bewegung: Die Emanzipation Homosexueller im 20. Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Männerschwarm Verlag, 2017. Ross, Chad. Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005. Spector, Scott, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog, eds. After The History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. Tobin, Robert Deam. Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2015.

CHAPTER 2

E E E “Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” Colonial Women’s Activism in Wartime and Weimar Germany, 1914–1926 K. Molly O’Donnell

My beginning research on the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society coincided with Jean Quataert’s investigation of Wilhelmine German patriotism and gender in her history of the German Women’s Red Cross, Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1816-1916 (2001). In the late 1980s, we witnessed how the process of globalization was contributing to radical expressions of nationalist identity within the United States. Since Jean was long active in peace protests, she was especially interested in the problem of relating popular activism in wartime to gender and nationalism after witnessing the rising tide of nationalist populism in the United States amid the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1990. Her pathbreaking study demonstrated that German women were integral to long-standing nationalist rituals of care through their war service to the nation. Her conclusions led her to new insights into how German women helped refashion the dynastic bonds to cement existing popular German patriotic ties after the founding of the Wilhelmine German Empire. Her attention to these continuities in German nationalism and her commitment to globalizing German history have greatly influenced my own research on German women’s colonialism. “Many voices will arise to ask: “Why do we need colonial organizations? Our work is done, now that Germany has lost its colonies.” —Else Frobenius, General Secretary of the Colonial Women’s League, 19191

The history of the German Colonial Women’s League, hereafter the League (Frauenbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), between 1914 and 1926 represents a decade of setbacks for German colonialist activism.

38 • K. Molly O’Donnell

Nationalist German women’s organizations, including the Red Cross, grew in power during World War I, but the League faced an existential crisis when British forces cut off shipping, travel, and communication between Germany and its colonies in August 1914. Though the League also assisted in the German women’s war service on the German home front, the war interrupted the League’s rituals of care for the German colonies. The League’s general secretary, journalist Else von Boetticher, better known by her penname Else Frobenius, described ordinary members’ recalcitrance: “We are cut off from our colonies! Why should we pay our dues? The more threatening the possibility of losing our colonies became, the more numerous became these voices.”2 Frobenius excelled in colonialist agitation and built strong connections between the League and the right-wing Nationalist People’s Party, or DVP, in the early 1920s. However, the postwar settlement cast colonial organizations’ purpose into question, as Germany’s defeat resulted in the loss of its overseas empire. In the early years of Weimar, rival German women’s nationalist organizations soon outcompeted the League for members, popular attention, and donations. The near extinction of the League in the early 1920s reflected a general slump of organized colonialism in early Weimar. A closer look at the history of the League suggests a sharp drop in the popularity of German women’s organized colonialism through 1925, followed by an unexpected revival. The decline of the League, and of colonial organizations in general in the early 1920s strongly signals the disjuncture between the mass colonialism of the Wilhelmine period and of the late Weimar and Nazi eras.3 Membership in German nationalist organizations is one of the few, however imperfect, measures of their strength over time, as well as an indication of their public support since local fundraising drives historically sustained German nationalist organizations’ efforts. The membership of the League swelled before 1914 but sank in the early 1920s. Surprisingly, however, by 1933 the League’s membership had catapulted it into an unprecedented historical position: as Hitler assumed power, the women’s colonial organization stood as the most popular colonial organization in Germany.4 As this chapter details, this popularity came at the price of the League’s independence.

Prewar Era The history of the Wilhelmine Colonial Women’s League represents a modest example of the patriotic women’s organizations of the period melding philanthropy and conservativism. These societies agitated for

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 39

Figure 2.1. • Membership of the Colonial Women’s League, 1908–1936. Mitgliederstand 1908–1936. 30. Jahre koloniale Frauenarbeit. Herausgegeben vom Reichskolonialbund. (Aacheners Verlags- und Druckerei-Gesellschaft, 1936.) Public Domain. Official membership figures vary by source.

40 • K. Molly O’Donnell

myriad patriotic causes, such as colonialism, anti-feminism, and military buildup. Membership was not restricted to women, but women of the middle and upper classes were drawn to these organizations, many with royal and aristocratic female patrons. There, German clubwomen could channel their patriotism into respectable areas of maternalist philanthropy without appearing to cross into the proscribed masculine sphere of party politics. Women’s patriotic organizations performed an important role in unifying the relatively new German national community across class, gender, and other divisions through public rituals of sacrifice for the nation that reinforced conservative gender and political ideals, but the League was anomalous because its mission offered German women a new outlet for their activism in the overseas empire.5 Founded in 1907, the League, though tiny in comparison to other influential nationalist women’s organizations, offered greater potential for women’s geographical mobility and independence than many of the larger, more established women’s nationalist organizations. The unseemliness of German women’s presence in the colonies in the Wilhelmine era perhaps explains why the organization had difficulty enlisting an aristocratic patroness. By January 1912, after five years of existence the Colonial Women’s League comprised only 13,158 members in 125 chapters. By contrast, Jean Quataert has demonstrated how the massive Patriotic Women’s Association (Verband der deutschen Vaterländische Frauenvereine), with nearly a million members, became indispensable to German war efforts. The organization coordinated field hospitals and disaster relief as an affiliate of the International Red Cross. Its patroness, the German Empress Augusta Victoria, elevated the organization’s status and ensured the success of its fundraising, which included reliable funding through a national lottery.6 Historians also have often noted the modest membership size of the Women’s League’s sibling organization, the male-led German Colonial Society, which likewise paled in comparison to many other nationalist groups. Most scholars claim these low memberships do not adequately reflect the organization’s real power, as measured by its rich purse and its leadership’s political, economic, and social prominence. Curiously, neither the men’s nor the women’s organizations excluded members of the opposite sex, but the organizational spheres of activism of the Women’s League were more closely tied to welfare in the colonies, particularly of German settler women and children, while the Colonial Society devoted much of its energy toward promoting economic, scientific, and political development in the German empire. The Colonial Society’s leadership were exclusively men: prominent German military, business, and aristocratic figures with close ties the German colonial administration who

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 41

exercised a disproportionate influence within the Wilhelmine German state. The president, Duke John Albert of Mecklenburg, was not only politically connected; he also headed the largest colonial charity fund, the German Colonial Welfare Lottery, to benefit settlers in the Germany colonies. Charitable lottery funds in Wilhelmine Germany required special legal concessions.7 Arguably, the Colonial Society’s massive lottery funding allowed it to dominate organized German colonialism, but the colonial movement as a whole exerted enormous social and cultural impact by popularizing colonial ideas among the masses and winning the patriotic public’s support for Germany’s overseas empire. Through public events and propaganda directed at men, women, and children of all classes, colonialists emphasized the benefits of empire for developing the international, strategic, and economic strength of Germany. They also featured German territories in Asia and Africa as potential target sites for German emigration, where transplanted German population would build powerful overseas settlements to demonstrate the preeminence of the German race and culture. The German women’s colonial organizations also contributed significantly to popularizing these ideas among all social strata, and particularly in claiming an imperial role for German women.8 Ordinary Germans did not absorb colonialist propaganda uncritically, but the League catered to mass ideas of colonial “enchantment” that captivated many working-class supporters.9 In addition to archival holdings in the collection of the German Colonial Society, the League documented its work in a monthly newsletter packaged within the pages of a popular magazine, Kolonie und Heimat (Colony and Home), replete with stories, poems, photos, and images romanticizing the colonies and reinforcing notions of German racial superiority and the need for national expansion (Lebensraum). Cover art often featured scantily costumed native women; heroic German colonial adventurers, scientists, soldiers, and officials; and safari hunters bagging exotic game. The League’s activism also furthered images of the colonies as an attainable destination for ordinary Germans through charities that assisted struggling German colonial families, particularly maternal and child welfare. The League founded its reputation on efforts to recruit and assist the emigration of unmarried German women to overseas employment in the German colony of Southwest Africa. Hundreds of young women applied to the program each year, attracted by the promise of secure and reputable well-paid overseas employment. The League strategically highlighted their recruits’ advantageous marriages in the colony as added incentive. The organization even operated a hostel in Keetmanshoop, Southwest Africa to house and train prospective servants for local German homes as well as a kindergarten and youth center in the

42 • K. Molly O’Donnell

city of Lüderitzbucht. At the beginning of 1912, however, the organization reported that its national treasury had fallen to only 3,116 marks in its general account, forcing a halt to projected expansion plans for women’s emigration to the colony of German East Africa.10 Between 1896 and 1914 the German Colonial Society disbursed Colonial Welfare Lottery Funds to pay for thousands of sponsored German women’s and children’s subsidized passages to the German colonies. As its sister organization, the League recruited and assisted hundreds of unmarried female employees, many from working-class backgrounds, to settle in German Southwest Africa. For example, in 1913 the Colonial Society sponsored 340 women and children’s passages; of these, 116 were female employees contracted through the League.11 In return for these funds, Mecklenburg and the rest of the Colonial Society’s conservative male leadership demanded full public recognition for the women’s emigration program and deference from the women’s organization over control the program and its policies. As the League expanded, however, competition for members and donations arose between it and more established German colonial organizations. Tensions had already surfaced by 1912 and culminated in 1914, when members of the Colonial Society’s board of directors (Vorstand) accused the League’s leadership of stealing credit for the women’s colonization scheme, poaching its members, and displaying dangerous feminist sympathies. Although the Colonial Society’s board threatened to sever ties with the League altogether, Mecklenburg instead revoked funding for women’s colonization. However, this blow did not cripple the League, which had solidified its financial position.12 By June 1914, the League had grown exponentially—membership had increased over 40 percent since the start of 1912 to 18,680 members in 144 chapters. The treasury stood at 37,000 marks cash (about $227,000 today). Credit for this remarkable upsurge belongs to the dynamic and charismatic leader, Hedwig Heyl, a nationally renowned expert in women’s home economics who chaired the organization since 1910. Heyl was a moderate feminist who regarded the spheres of men’s and women’s work as separate, and women’s primary role as housewives and mothers, while still championing new areas for women’s colonial activism. She brought the Colonial Women’s League into the German League of Women’s Associations (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF) in 1912, widening her organization’s appeal to millions of Germany’s middle-class clubwomen and even organizing a display of women’s colonial work at the BDF’s national exhibit on German women. The League’s efforts to promote German women’s colonial emigration aligned with the BDF, as the largest association of the German moderate feminist organizations: broadening women’s educational and employment opportunities.

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 43

Heyl’s leadership brought popular attention to the League, particularly from moderate feminists and middle-class clubwomen. Her campaign expanded the organization’s membership and coffers, as well as its outreach. So, in spite of the lost lottery funds, in June 1914 Heyl reported that the League finally planned to branch out into East Africa by developing a rest home for women and children suffering from the tropical climate, as well as to establish two new kindergartens for white children in Southwest Africa.13 Despite the League’s remarkable progress in developing grassroots German women’s colonialism, the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 halted its momentum.

National War Service Throughout the course of the war, the League adapted to the evolving challenges and widening privation within Germany. At first, the organization reacted to the war emergency alongside other German patriotic women’s organizations. Heyl omitted all mention of the colonies in her first proclamation to the membership in August 1914, referring to the war effort as “the fight for the rights, freedom and culture of our Volk,” and channeling all the organization’s reserves toward immediate war relief for the homeland. She assumed leadership in organizing the national food supplies, while the League instituted a soup kitchen at its Berlin national headquarters for middle-class women in need, serving nearly seven hundred regular visitors each day.14 Although cut off from the German colonies by the conflict, the League banded with numerous other German women’s clubs within the BDF at the start of the conflict. Mobilizing within the German National Women’s Service (Nationaler Frauendienst), female members from local chapters of various private women’s groups coalesced to address the home front’s immediate demands arising from the war in cities and districts throughout Germany. These chapter members primarily assisted in the rationing of provisions, caring for families in hardship, and promoting women’s wartime employment until November 1916, when the German War Office formed to assume these burdens.15 The wartime shipping blockade against Germany remained in effect between 1914 and 1919, effectively halting direct overseas trade and travel. There are no accurate figures available for the number of colonials displaced in the war as a whole, but the League and its individual chapters aided stranded German colonials in their communities as a patriotic wartime duty. The League produced a fundraising pamphlet in the first months of the conflict, equating the public service of colonial interests

44 • K. Molly O’Donnell

with true German patriotism and designating the woman of Germany as “warriors for Germandom.”16 Even quite early in the war, the League may have found the broader public unresponsive to fundraising to relieve colonists’ privations in competition with urgent Red Cross funding appeals for the care of frontline German soldiers.17 War service tended to radicalize German women’s nationalism, but the Women’s League’s wartime propaganda not only assumed a more strident tone but also began to articulate the goal of promoting racism and eugenics in the colonies as part of its core mission: “The Women’s League wants to prepare the German woman in Southwest Africa for her great patriotic and cultural duties by bolstering feeling for the homeland and racial consciousness, protecting physical and moral integrity, and preserving a healthy progeny.”18 Although racist motivations for German women’s colonialism were long evident, the organization had rarely appealed openly to German women’s racism before the war. Perhaps in an attempt to overcome the indifference of the reluctant German public, the League’s wartime fundraising boldly began to proclaim an essential role for patriotic German women promoting German racism and race-consciousness and ensuring the health and quality of future generations.19

The League Resumes Its Aid to the German Colonies The legislature of South Africa voted to invade Southwest Africa on 10 September 1914, with an army of overwhelming numerical superiority: German colonial forces mustered about 5,000 men, while South Africa had over 70,000 in uniform, and deployed 43,000. Unlike other German campaigns in Africa, only white soldiers took part, although thousands of black domestic and transport workers performed most of the labor behind the lines. Expansive deserts, drought, and other natural defenses as well as political divisions between Afrikaner and British South Africans only delayed the inevitable victory, and South African forces defeated the German colony by July 1915 with little direct engagement and remarkably few casualties. Still, 103 Germans and 113 South African soldiers were killed in action.20 As soon as possible after the ceasefire in Southwest Africa, the League resumed efforts to aid German colonists. The League mobilized to provide funds and care packages to overseas communities, and soon reopened its kindergarten. The organization’s newsletters in the pages of the magazine Kolonie und Heimat regularly printed missives from grateful colonials. Colorful testimonials of wartime events from Germans in Southwest Af-

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 45

rica (as well as from the invasions of Cameroon, and, later, German East Africa) spurred donations from the homeland. Not surprisingly, these accounts deplored the destructiveness of the enemy and the severity of Germans’ wartime plight in the colonies: “The Southwest African settlers’ need is great, very great. . . . The chapters must mobilize their works of love as soon as possible, and lead the way for our hard-pressed setters with charity evenings and fund drives.”21 The organization’s renewed focus brought local members together, as it had before the war. The League’s newsletter urged chapters to form local sewing bees to benefit German colonials. Many chapters responded by scheduling weekly gatherings for the cause, which the national leadership lauded as a means of recruiting new members and cementing ties with existing ones. Individual chapters also began to adopt particular overseas colonial families in need. A nationwide clothing drive produced fifty-three crates of cast-offs to be distributed in Southwest Africa. Above all, the Women’s League emphasized a German national duty to their comrades in the colonies (employing the radicalized term Volksgenossen), “whose suffering for our Fatherland has been far greater than here in the homeland.”22 (Nationalist references to a common Volk evoked the notion of a common German racial community, which Hitler later espoused.) Favorable comparisons of the relative hardships of Germans in the homeland to the colonies in 1915 later evaporated as the war ground on and German civilians’ own trials continued to mount. The League responded to the wartime attrition of members with regular recruitment drives. However, in winter 1917 fuel was so scarce in Germany that many chapters suspended meetings. Only twenty-two continued regularly convening—eleven more with a reduced schedule.23 Despite growing hardship in Germany, members of the League’s chapters continued to amass what charitable donations they could muster for distressed German colonials at home and overseas. Fundraising appeals featured captive Germans in the colonies, particularly internees and prisoners of war throughout the former overseas empire. Heyl represented these ongoing collections as an investment in the restoration of the German colonial territories, one that would lay the groundwork for Women’s League’s rebuilding efforts once peace arrived, as she launched an all-out membership drive in October 1917 to reverse losses in the organization’s ranks.24 In a two-part essay to her members entitled “Why Do We Need the Colonial Women’s League in Wartime?” Heyl underscored the theme of restoring the German colonies. In it, she outlined the organization’s purpose in terms of its positive, practical achievements in support of German women as colonists and in building German colonial family life:

46 • K. Molly O’Donnell For as long as the League has existed, it has been occupied primarily with offering concrete promotion of women’s emigration, their settlement in the colonies, and their introduction to colonial work. . . . The League also assisted women living in Africa by caring for their children, removing them from the influence of colored servants [farbige Dienstboten], and raising them in kindergartens in the German model. . . . The war has obliterated all of this.25

In Heyl’s view, the war represented not only a barbarous assault on colonial German women and their families, but also foreign enemies’ attack against German women’s civilizing work as a whole. She rallied her members to contribute to the national war service by caring for German civilians and soldiers from the lost territories and to maintain their belief in Germany’s colonial future.26 However, as even Heyl acknowledged, the longer the war continued, the more women’s patriotic efforts in Germany overshadowed the colonies. As Germany’s defeat began to appear inevitable, solidifying the loss of its overseas empire, the League began to search for new areas of activism to revive its membership. The June 1918 celebration of the organization’s tenth anniversary as an auxiliary of the Colonial Society served as a grim milestone. A booklet commemorating the history of the Women’s League offered the meager consolation that it had survived four years of wartime separated from Germany’s colonial possessions. The organization claimed, although the numbers are unverifiable, that its strength stood at nearly its prewar level (17,800 members in 148 chapters), and the anniversary funding appeal amassed 5,000 marks to benefit returning colonial Germans and ongoing drives to aid colonial veterans of the long East African colonial campaign.27 Despite the forced optimism of the anniversary celebration, the future was bleak as Germany’s impending defeat grew increasingly evident. The shared area of German women’s war work had provided the organization continued areas of activism and fundraising, rechanneling its rituals of care to displaced German colonials while cut off from the colonies and capitalizing on Germans’ enthusiasm for its East African front for public donations. The new peace threatened the League’s very survival. The postwar era represented a new landscape for German women’s patriotic activism in general, with few continuities with the past.

Transition to Weimar On 9 November 1918 the German home front crumbled in the wake of Germany’s defeat as scattered mutinies and revolutionary violence

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 47

throughout Germany resulted in the collapse of the German monarchy, with Frederick Ebert, head of the German Social Democratic Party, declaring a German Republic. On 11 November, his government surrendered, resulting in an armistice ending the world war. A staunch monarchist, Heyl responded to the political upheaval by acknowledging that although many women in the League had never sought the vote, newly enfranchised German women had the duty to participate in the new republic. She called on her members to extend their war service into peacetime by caring for returning soldiers and prisoners of war, especially from the colonies. She noted the particular debt of the Fatherland to the national heroes of the East African campaign, led by German General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who conducted guerrilla operations in the region, eluding capture throughout the war. The League, alongside other colonial organizations, stewarded the Colonial Veteran Fund, the most reliable source of funding for colonial organizations in the Weimar era, with Lettow-Vorbeck’s image as the public face of this effort. Other fundraising efforts struggled—a signal that the popularity of colonialism among the masses had declined.28 Although all German patriotic women’s organizations had difficulties establishing their postwar relevance, the loss of Germany’s overseas empire robbed the League of its purpose. Worse yet, the Colonial Women’s League failed to capitalize fully on women’s political rights in the new republic, remaining unaffiliated with a particular party, despite Frobenius’s prominence in the Women’s Committee of the nationalist DVP. Primary sources for the Colonial Women’s League grow sketchy for the years between 1918 and 1923, but the void seems to reflect accurately the chapters’ dwindling activism. Facing the loss of the colonies, Chair Hedwig Heyl pleaded her membership to remain loyal, with little success. Members repeatedly proposed returning the organization to its prewar projects, including founding a new school in Germany to train women for colonial work and resuming German women’s sponsored colonization in Southwest Africa, but, just as before the war, the League was stymied by insufficient funds. As inflation ramped up, donations dwindled so severely that the organization struggled to offer fulfilling work for its membership in these years.29 Other important changes were already underway. In January 1920, soon after reaching the milestone of her seventieth birthday, Hedwig Heyl resigned as chair of the League; her successor was the elderly but eminent fellow officer Hedwig von Bredow, nee Countess of Stechow. After serving as Colonial Society president for twenty-five years, Duke John Albert died in February 1920. Theodor Seitz, the former governor of German Southwest Africa, succeeded him as president, serving from

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1920 to 1930.30 Without the benefit of the Colonial Society’s former political connections and financial support, the League exerted little political sway, particularly after the chair eschewed party affiliations. New colonial organizations proliferated in early Weimar, mainly populated by returnees who fixated on recovering the lost colonies, focused on the past rather than on the future. Despite the growing number of colonial groups, they were smaller, narrower in scope, financially shakier, and far less influential. Returning colonial German officials assumed a central role in Weimar colonial organizations. The German Colonial Society still retained its position as the leading German colonial lobby, although its lottery was depleted, and its president, Seitz, became a moving force behind the German efforts to restore the colonies to Germany.31 Foreign powers had occupied all of Germany’s overseas territories in the war, and victors’ claims dimmed Germany’s prospects for their return. A propaganda battle between Great Britain and Germany had erupted in 1916 when the British charged German colonial troops with war crimes. In 1918 Britain fanned the flames, releasing a compilation of official records and oral testimony (some of contested validity) detailing German colonials’ abuse of Africans. British officials claimed that German atrocities in the colonies demonstrated Germans’ abject barbarism, while enlightened nations such as England were better suited to be colonial rulers. Former German colonial officials and colonialist spokespersons unsuccessfully countered this British “colonial guilt lie” throughout the following decades.32 The campaign to restore the German colonies became the most visible initiative of the League and other colonialist women during the early Weimar era. For the first time, the organization mobilized German women to enter the political fray through petitions and demonstrations. A variety of other nationalist interest groups cooperated with the League’s efforts, including the massive German Catholic and Protestant women’s organizations, as well as fellow colonial organizations. Nationalist feminist leader and head of the BDF Gertrud Bäumer launched a female nationwide petition to restore the German colonies in December 1918. She also convened a national meeting of German women’s organizations on International Women’s Day (8 March 1919) with a press release to 240 German newspapers on behalf of all German women, proclaiming the common resolve of several hundred women’s organizations against the “theft of the German colonies.” The press statement on behalf of German women pronounced, “We strongly reject the allegations of mistreatment against native peoples. We are convinced that Germans, above all other

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 49

peoples, have treated them most humanely.”33 Despite nationalist women’s efforts, their campaign to exonerate German colonial men did not succeed any better than other colonialist agitation in restoring Germany’s overseas empire. The League’s participation in the women’s campaign for the return of the German colonies reflects what many historians have described as the maternalist-nationalism of women’s groups on the right in early Weimar. German women asserted their position as guardians of Germany’s culture, morals, and civility against the Entente allegations of Germany’s guilt for causing the war, its wartime atrocities, and its history of barbarism toward colonial subjects. The League embraced a circumscribed, genteel feminine understanding of female citizenship, rejecting partisanship, championing policies aimed at the restoration of the family and reproduction, and depicting female civic activism as a “duty to the nation.”34 By March 1919 the League and fellow colonial societies launched public demonstrations against the “theft of the colonies” in major cities across Germany. Middle-class women’s political protests were still relatively new and controversial. The League publicized local petition drives and events with speakers held indoors, which decreased their impact. When the head of the League chapter in Bad Godesberg appealed for a permit for her planned demonstration, occupying British forces pressured the town’s mayor to deny her, and even threatened a psychiatric examination if she persisted. Further indicating how unpopular street protests were with members, the League announced only one more rally, to be held indoors in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall in July 1920. Violent clashes in the streets in early Weimar became a common outlet for male political anger, which further deterred peaceful middle-class women’s demonstrations.35 Despite widespread German opposition, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles took place on 28 June 1919. Its terms permanently stripped Germany of its former colonies. In September 1919, the League also joined with numerous organizations in the German popular resistance movement against the planned Entente prosecution of the Kaiser and German leaders as war criminals. The League repeatedly protested the detrimental conditions of the treaty for Germany. However, the activism of women in radical nationalist political parties such as the DVP and DNVP overshadowed the League, organizing much more visible and coordinated campaigns against the peace terms, particularly the racially inflammatory campaign alleging that French occupation forces from the French colonies stationed in Western Germany were seducing and raping German women.36

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Reorientation toward Women’s Emigration In the wake of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the League general secretary Else Frobenius again reflected on the question “Why Do We Need a Colonial Frauenbund?” in late 1919: “[W]hy do we need colonial organizations, now that Germany has lost its colonies? To which we must respond yet again, “Do not forget our colonial Germans! . . . It is our holy duty not to leave the colonial Germans in the lurch!”37 By the end of 1919, however, colonialists’ resignation became apparent as the editors of the journal Kolonie und Heimat rechristened it as Ausland und Heimat (Overseas and Home), commemorating in its first cover story “Thirty-Five Years of German Colonial Politics and Their End.” The magazine assumed its new theme, focusing broadly on German women’s emigration not only to former German colonies but also to many other possible destinations. The Women’s League’s officers joined a national government oversight committee reviewing Weimar emigration policies and the German Protection League (Deutsche Schutzbund) for Germans overseas. A number of the Women’s League chapters even served as local bureaus where prospective overseas emigrants could seek official information and advice.38 In this difficult political climate, Heyl advanced a dubious claim that all German women’s overseas settlement represented a form of colonization: “Wherever Germans are overseas is being colonized, regardless of national claims of possession, which can be disputed.”39 By mobilizing the League to promote German women’s emigration to other nations, Heyl politicized the act of emigration but obscured the reality that overseas migration, unlike colonial settlement, resulted in a net population loss to Germany. Historians see the shift from colonialism toward emigration as an aggressive signal of the German right’s growing interest in expansion into Central and Eastern Europe as new areas for German colonization. Heyl did not make this leap directly, though Frobenius offered a radicalized vision of German women’s emigration as patriotic, eugenic, and race-conscious: If the millions of men who must emigrate today do not have German women to stand by their sides, if they are forced to marry girls of foreign races, most likely of lower races, then they and their progeny will be unsalvageable for Germandom. . . . The Women’s League of the German Colonial Society intends to join in this work. . . . Women’s emigration can and must come. It is to be desired that not only work-shy and flippant girls participate, but instead valuable and capable girls, who will one day be mothers of a new generation of German mothers.40

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 51

As noted, political appeals to women as mothers—eliding German women’s cultural role with their genetic contributions—certainly became important symbols to the radical right in Weimar and later Nazi Germany. Still, German women in early Weimar were most drawn to maternalism based on racial and biological understandings of nationalism, völkisch motherhood. The Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband) and the national committee, the Völkische Reichsauschuß of the DNVP, most visibly promoted such right-wing family and population politics in Germany.41 On paper, the League in March 1920 remained seventeen thousand members strong, but already efforts to economize sharpened. In light of the dispirited mood, the executive board sent four of its best-known lecturers on a shoestring budget to tour regional chapters, drum up support among the members, and appeal for public donations. The League’s contract to publish its newsletter within the popular Kolonie und Heimat magazine previously had contributed to the organization’s mass exposure and rapid growth. The circulation of its successor, Ausland und Heimat, fell rapidly and soon forced it to contract from twelve issues a year to ten. As printing costs mounted, the organization shifted its official publication to the pages of a less expensive but also less popular newspaper, The Colonial German (Der Kolonial-Deutsche), in 1921.42 Embracing women’s overseas emigration as a substitute for women’s colonization failed to distinguish or revitalize the League, especially as numerous other nationalist women’s organizations also began mobilizing on behalf of “overseas Germans” in lost German territories and historic settlements in Europe. At the League’s national convocation, one spokeswoman bitterly remarked, “When asked to report on our current emigration activities, I was overcome by melancholy pain in remembrance of our beautiful peacetime work of assisting German girls and women to settle in our German colonies as culture bearers for German manners and customs and future mothers to a growing generation of strong young Germans.”43 The notion that emigration work was somehow a lesser project for Germany’s women detracted from the organization’s sense of purpose and likely undercut its formerly popular profile, whereas French and British authorities promoted European women’s overseas colonization in the 1920s.44

The Devastating Impact of Inflation All available evidence suggests the German Colonial Women’s League chapters’ activism declined after 1920. Without grassroots fundraising in local communities in the form of lectures, slideshows, or benefits to

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publicize and solicit donations, the national organization’s funding dried up and recruitment stalled. The executive board called for more aid for German settlers in Southwest Africa, but the value of the German currency, which had lessened during the war, began to plummet. Aid to Germans settlers residing in the former colony of Southwest Africa had to be exchanged into local currency (British pounds). So, for example, in 1921 the League sponsored a national book drive that amassed six crates of literature but could not afford the shipping cost to Africa. A separate fund drive to maintain the League’s kindergarten in Lüderitzbucht failed to reach its goal, requiring collections among local Germans to keep it operating.45 The postwar inflation in Germany deposed nationalist women from their long-standing role as benefactors to the colonies, just as the loss of empire robbed the League of its chief mission. As the League’s cash reserves continued to dwindle, the executive board asked chapters to register for foreign aid packages from the U.S. American Relief Administration despite the humiliation of receiving charity for its middle-class members. The League drew its donations to colonial returnees from these foreign aid packages and from a cheap, secondhand clothing depot. Finally, in January 1921, once the South African authorities governing the Mandate of Southwest Africa reopened the territory to German emigration, the League chair von Bredow called on local chapters to raise sufficient funds to transport German emigration there, but the drive failed because the ship passages were unaffordable.46 The economic position of the organization only continued to deteriorate as its chapters’ reported activities slowed. The League’s rosy official membership figures in May 1923 still resembled the prewar era: 16,266 active members in 96 chapters. By April 1924, however, the League was forced to send around a questionnaire to ascertain which chapters were still operational. Its newsletter reported only a few minor charitable ventures such as summer holiday excursions for two dozen former colonial children from cities hosted in members’ homes. The national headquarters furloughed its staff and consolidated its office space, and the League no longer kept accurate membership records between June 1923 through 1926, when fewer than forty chapters were active— below a third of its wartime strength. Even the chapter count is exaggerated since the organization continued to recognize chapters if only a handful of members contributed even nominal dues. The Berlin chapter continued to host an annual colonial ball fundraiser and commemorate national Colonial Week, but only a shell of the former League survived by 1926.47

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 53

Conclusions Why did the league reach a state of near collapse? Historians charge that the postwar League was mired in the past, but it had no means of moving forward—nor was it alone in its decline. Surviving patriotic organizations typically experienced severe reversals in the early Weimar years. New forms of nationalist activism—whether women’s committees of the radical political parties or male paramilitary organizations on the right—siphoned the support of younger Germans attracted to unmediated expressions of nationalism. As nationalist political propaganda grew increasingly sophisticated and varied, parties and organizations directed messages aimed toward particular interests, targeting audiences of a particular class, age, or gender. The nationalist organizations that struggled the most in the Weimar era were the ones like the League, with aging leadership who did not appreciate the new mass, völkisch nationalism, and who strove to remain above party politics while maintaining rigid class hierarchy. In particular, successful Weimar women’s nationalist organizations expanded and radicalized the scope of their philanthropic activism, appealing to a younger generation across class lines, as they drew women into modern political propaganda work. Financially stricken former colonial settlers comprised the bulk of colonial organizations’ Weimar membership, and they resented the lavishness of the annual Berlin colonial ball and any other initiatives that did not directly benefit distressed former colonials.48 The near demise of the League by 1926 reflects a broader decline in popular German colonialism as a political movement primarily because its relevance ended along with the German empire. In the Weimar era, German women—and men—had developed new, often far more radical and direct forms of mass political activism to replace the former Wilhelmine nationalist lobbying associations. Even so, the early history of the League amply demonstrates how strong leadership, stable funding, and clever campaigning mobilized Wilhelmine German women to such powerful colonial activism that they outstripped the narrow oversight of the male-dominated German Colonial Society. Securing funds for women’s colonialism had always been the most pressing challenge, but donations were forthcoming as long as the League had offered a compelling vision for ordinary German women to serve as helpmeets in the great German colonial endeavor, offering women a practical and activist political role within the nation by aiding fellow German women’s and children’s overseas migration, family formation, and welfare in the African colonies. Until now, the League had always maintained its essential vision to skeptics when asked, “Why do we need a Colonial German Women’s League?”

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But the organization no longer had a convincing answer by the end of 1925. Although maternalist-nationalist Weimar women invested ever more in German women’s patriotic and racial contribution as mothers of the Volk, without a German claim to overseas territories in which to enact these impulses, the League and its former works seemed to be defunct, just another relic of Germany’s lost colonial past. In 1926 the League unexpectedly began to revive at the cost of its independence. Gustav Stresemann’s Foreign Office, eager to resume German colonial agitation, offered the national leadership secret funding for resuming its work, creating the illusion of a resurgent, independent German women’s grassroots colonial movement. Ironically, as its autonomy withered, the League reached the height of its membership in these years, surpassing the German Colonial Society as the largest colonial organization in Germany. The wide fluctuations in membership point to the historical difficulties of measuring the mass appeal of organized German colonialism, or even assessing continuities between prewar and postwar colonialism. Thanks to these sudden infusions, the League rebounded from nearly collapsing to thriving between 1926 through 1936. The Weimar and later the Nazi state funded its mass propaganda as well as its activism in caring for ethnic Germans in Africa, especially women and children, reshaping the organization from prewar grassroots women’s colonialism to promoting state-sponsored eugenic and racial population policies in the former colonies. Indeed, the League’s ties to the German state only strengthened immediately following Hitler’s seizure of power. In the early 1930s the League touted its lengthy continued history of aid to German settler families in Africa, which spanned from the Wilhelmine era onward. This claim to continuity to the pioneering prewar colonial movement ignored the deep changes in the league. The League’s Weimar colonialist agitation recruited a largely new generation of supporters, until in 1936 Nazi colonial leaders determined that Germany no longer needed a separate German women’s colonial movement, abruptly dissolving the league, in order to absorb its members for direct popular mobilization supporting Nazi expansion and colonization in Eastern and Central Europe.

K. Molly O’Donnell is professor of history and director of the humanities track in the Honors College of the William Paterson University of New Jersey. She is the chief editor, with Renate Bridenthal and Nancy Reagin, of The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness. Her most recent book is titled The Servants of Empire: Sponsored German Women’s Colonization in Southwest Africa, 1896-1945 (Berghahn Books, 2022).

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 55

Notes 1. Else Frobenius, “Wozu brauchen wir einen Kolonialen Frauenbund?” Kolonie und Heimat 12, no. 32 (1919): 7; Ausland und Heimat 12, no. 40 (1919) and no. 46 (1919), 2; Venghiattis, “Mobilizing for Nation and Empire”; Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884-1945; and “Gender and Colonial Politics after the Versailles Treaty,” in Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects, eds. Canning, Barndt, and McGuire, 339–59. For more on Frobenius, see Lora Wildenthal, “MassMarketing Colonialism and Nationalism: The Career of Else Frobenius in the ‘Weimarer Republik,’” and “Nazi Germany,” in Nation, Politik und Geschlecht Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne, ed. Planert, 328–45; and Frobenius, Erinnerungen einer Journalistin. The League published its newsletter on the pages of the journal Kolonie und Heimat until 1920, cited hereafter as KuH. 2. Else Frobenius, “Kriegsarbeit des Frauenbundes der D.K.G.,” in Hedwig Heyl. Ein Gedenkblatt zu ihrem 70. Geburtstage, ed. Elise von Hopffgarten (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1920), 120–24, quote on p. 123. 3. The resurgence in the League figures into the revival of mass colonialist propaganda under Gustav Stresemann’s Foreign Office after 1926, as documented in Christian Rogowski, “‘Heraus mit unseren Kolonien!’: Der Kolonialrevisionismus der Weimarer Republik und die ‘Hamburger Kolonialwoche’ von 1926,” in Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus, ed. Kundrus, 243–62; and “The ‘Colonial Idea’ in Weimar Cinema,” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture and Modern Memory, ed. Langbehn, 220–38. However, most recent scholarship has highlighted the Weimar period as an era of German “postcolonialism,” which recycled the history and memories of Wilhelmine colonial fantasies and knowledge and connected them to Nazi expansionism. See Marcia Klotz, “The Weimar Republic: A Post-Colonial State in a Still-Colonial World,” in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, eds. Ames, Klotz, and Wildenthal, 135–47; Britta Schilling, Postcolonial Germany Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See Geoff Eley, “Empire by Land or Sea? Germany’s Imperial Imaginary, 1840-1945,” in German Colonialism in a Global Age, eds. Naranch and Eley. 4. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 296. Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 53–54 (note 62), 101. 5. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy: 7–9, 184. See also Chickering, “‘Casting Their Gaze More Broadly,’” 156–85; Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation.” 6. Red Cross figures in Quataert, Staging Philanthropy, 184. Frauenbund membership in 1912, “Sitzung am 8. Januar des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft,” KuH 5, no. 24 (1912), 8. 7. Pierard, “The German Colonial Society, 1882-1914.” Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German; and Short, Magic Lantern Empire, 13, 32–35. See my article, “French and German Women’s Colonial Settlement Movements, 1896-1904,” 92–110. 8. Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, further establishes German women’s significance within the colonial movement. 9. Short, Magic Lantern Empire, 79.

56 • K. Molly O’Donnell 10. General Secretary Gertrud von Hatten, “Die Frauenfrage in den Deutschen Kolonien,” KuH 6, no. 18 (1913): 8. “Sitzung am 8. Januar des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft,” and “Sitzung am 5. Februar 1912,” KuH 5, no. 25 (1912): 8. 11. Figures from my dissertation, “The Colonial Woman Question: Gender, National Identity, and Empire in the German Colonial Society Female Emigration Program” (PhD diss., Binghamton University, 1996), 8, 191, and 214. 12. Chickering, “Casting Their Gaze More Broadly,’”; and Claire Venghiattis, “Conflict over Women’s Patriotic Activism: Gender Relations and the German Colonial Movement during the Kaiserreich,” in Ihrem Volk verantwortlich. Frauen der politischen Rechten (1890-1933). Organisationen—Agitationen – Ideologien, eds. Schöck-Quinteros and Streubel, 87–108; and Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation,” 71–74. 13. Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 156–71; Heyl, Frauenbund annual report for 1914 in “Die Tagung des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft in Münster,” Mitteilungen des Frauenbundes der D.K.G., KuH 7, no. 42 (1914): 8. 14. An die Mitglieder des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft,” and “Liebestätigkeit des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft,” KuH 7, no. 48 (1914): 8; “Jahresbericht des Frauenbundes (Fortsetzung),” KuH 9, no. 42 (1915): 10. 15. Guttmann, Weibliche Heimarmee, 130–41. 16. “Aufruf!” undated pamphlet, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Collection of the D.K.G., (R. 8023), File 257, folio 174–75, fall 1914. 17. On nationalist clubwomen’s wartime work, see Hedwig Heyl, Aus meinem Leben, vol. 2 Weibliches Schaffen und Werken (Berlin: Schwetschke und Sohn, 1925), 85; Quataert, Staging Philanthropy, 272–83; Cohen, The War Come Home, 6; and Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 16–23, which discusses the German state’s strict regulation over war charities fundraising after 1917 to enforce rationalization. 18. “Aufruf!” pamphlet: “Festigung des Rassebewüßtseins, Schutz der physischen und sittlichen Unversehrheit und Erhaltung einer gesunden Nachkommenschaft.” 19. Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 168–70, explores the danger of adopting an overt racial agenda, given the colonialist movement’s history of relegating German women’s participation only to issues surrounding racial reproduction and pronatalism in the colonies. 20. Strachan, The First World War in Africa, chapter 4. 21. Quote from “Brief der Vorsitzenden unserer Abteilung Lüderitzbucht, Fräulein Wehlmann, aus englischer Kriegsgefangenschaft,” KuH 8, no. 37 (1915): 10; “Die Notlage unserer Ansiedler in Südwestafrika,”KuH 8 no. 52 (1915), 10. 22. “Frauenbund-Spende,” KuH 9, no. 1 (1915): 10. 23. “Jahresbericht des Frauenbund,”KuH 9, no. 47 (1916): 10; “Jahresbericht 1916/17,” KuH 10, nos. 46 and 47 (1917): 7. 24. Hedwig Heyl, “Zum Jahreswechsel,” KuH 10, no. 14 (1917): 10, and no. 15 (1917): 6. 25. Hedwig Heyl, “Warum brauchen wir im Kriege den Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft?” KuH 11, nos. 2 and 3 (1917): 7.

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 57 26. Hedwig Heyl, “Warum brauchen wir, (Schluß),” KuH 11, no. 3 (1917): 7. 27. Hedwig Heyl, Aus meinem Leben, vol. 2, 85; 10 Jahre Frauenbund der DeutschenKolonialgesellschaft (Berlin: Kolonie und Heimat Verlagsgesellschaft, 1918), 12– 13, 41; and Frobenius, “Kriegsarbeit,” 122. 28. Hedwig Heyl, “Unsere Pflichten im neuen Staat,” KuH 12, no. 9 (1918): 3; B.A.B., 8023/164, 10.4.1916 bis 28.8/1922, Frauenbunde der Deutschkolonialgesellschaft Sitzungsberichte, f. 128 (7 April 1918). 29. “Aufruf zur Veredelung des Parteikampfes,” KuH 12, no. 25 (1919): 7; SüchtingHänger, “Das Gewissen der Nation,” 155–56; B.A.B., Akte 8023/164, fol. 96: Sitzungsbericht 15 March 1919; fol. 120, 16. Jan. 1919 and fol. 72, 6 June 1920. 30. Wolfe W. Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 1919-1945 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967), 1–11; Süchting-Hänger, “Das Gewissen der Nation,” 155, notes the two postwar organizations still squabbled over funding. Bredow (1853–1832) wrote Rund um Afrika (Frauenbund d. DKG, 1932). 31. Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies; Schmokel, Dream of Empire, 4–5; Smith, Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, 213–18; Wempe, “Lost at Locarno?” 168–75. 32. Jan-Bart Gewald and Jeremy Silvester, “Footsteps and Tears: An Introduction to the construction and context of the 1918 ‘Blue Book,’” in Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia (Leiden: Brill, 2003); and Christina Twomey, “Atrocity Narratives and Inter-Imperial Rivalry: Britain Germany and the Treatment of ‘Native Races,’ 1904-1939,” in Crook and Taithe, eds., Evil, Barbarism and Empire, 201–25. 33. “Kolonialkundgebung deutscher Frauenvereine,” KuH 12, no. 20 (1919): 7. 34. Kathleen Canning, “Claiming Citizenship: Suffrage and Subjectivity in Germany after the First World War,” in Canning, Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects; Wildenthal, “Gender and Colonial Politics”; Scheck, “Women against Versailles,” 21–42, especially footnote 32. See also Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes. 35. B.A.B., DKG 8023/164, fol. 96 and fol. 56 Sitzungsbericht von 15 March 1919 and 30 August 1920. KuH (1919) 12 nos. 18, 20, 23. Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 346–47. Eley notes patriotic organizations and foreign policies declined in early Weimar, as new paramilitary associations offered a new outlet for bourgeois radical nationalism. 36. “Welche Pflicht hat der koloniale Frauenbund im Augenblick zu erfüllen?” KuH 12, no. 18 (1918): 8; Aus den Abteilungen,” and “Aufruf zur Veredlung des Parteikampfes” KuH 12, no. 25 (1919): 7. Scheck, Mothers of the Nation, 117–22, details the DNVP and DVP foreign-policy campaigns against the war settlement, culminating in the popular Weimar German racist campaign opposing French troops from its colonies in Africa and Asia occupying West German territory between 1920 and 1924. There is no evidence of parallel effort by the Women’s Colonial League. 37. “Wozu brauchen wir einen Kolonialen Frauenbund?,” I, KuH 12, no. 32 (1919): 7. 38. Ausland und Heimat 12, no. 40 (1919) and no. 46 (1919): 2. Angelika Schaser, “Das Engagement des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine für das ‘Auslandsdeutschtum’: Weibliche ‘Kulturaufgabe’ und nationale Politik vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis 1933,” in Nation, Politik, und Geschlecht, ed. Planert, 256–74, 261.

58 • K. Molly O’Donnell 39. Quote from Heyl’s memoir, Aus meinem Leben, vol. II, 85: “denn wo Deutschland im Ausland sind, wird kolonisiert, unbeschadet des Landbesitzes, der ihnen streitig gemacht werden konnte.” Wildenthal discusses Heyl’s remarks in “Mass-Marketing,” 329, and “Gender and Colonial Politics,” 2. 40. Else Frobenius, “Die Auswanderung und die deutsche Frau,” Ausland und Heimat 12, no. 46 (1919): 2. 41. For more background on Weimar right-wing maternalist politics see SüchtingHänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation,” 266–76, as well as Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation, 93–109; and Scheck, Mothers of the Nation, 65–77. 42. Schaser, “Das Engagement des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine,” notes the BDF and many other competing organizations supporting overseas Germans; B.A.B., 8023/164, fol. 60 and 53, Ausschuß-sitzungsbericht 27 March 1920 and 6. Okt 1920. 43. “Mitteilungen der Frauenbund d. D.K.G.,” Der Kolonialdeutsche (1921): 179; “Die Betreuung von Auswandern,” Frau Helga Boysen, Hamburg, zur Hauptversammlung des FB d. DKG. On the propaganda campaign, see B.A.B. 8023/164, fol. 58–59, Auschuß-sitzungsbericht, 30 August 1920. 44. British women’s emigration societies coalesced into the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women in 1919, and the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 provided state funding for assisted men’s and women’s colonization across the empire. See Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land, 96; Ha, French Women and the Empire, 188 and 197. 45. Auschuß-sitzungsbericht, 30 August 1920. 46. BAB, 8023/180-81 discusses return emigration conditions and fares: 6,250 marks in 1921 as opposed to 150 marks in 1914. 47. Ausschuß-sitzungsbericht, 30 August 1920 and 6. Okt 1920, fol. 54; “Zum Jahreswechsel an unsere Mitglieder, Abteilungen und Gauverbande,” Der Kolonialdeutsche (1921): 12; “Der Frauenbund und seine Arbeit,” Der Kolonialdeutsche (August 1924): 148. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing for Nation and Empire,” 285, on membership figures; B.A.B., German Foreign Office, file 1197. 48. Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation,” 156 and 181; Sean Wempe, “Lost at Locarno,” 189–92.

Bibliography Ames, Eric, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, eds. Germany’s Colonial Pasts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Canning, Kathleen, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire, eds. Weimar Publics/ Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920. New York: Berghahn, 2010. Chickering, Roger. We Men Who Feel Most German. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984. ———. “‘Casting Their Gaze More Broadly’: Women’s Patriotic Activism in Imperial Germany.” Past and Present 118 (1988): 156–85. Cohen, Deborah. The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

“Why Do We Need the German Colonial Women’s League?” • 59 Crook, T., and B. Taithe, eds. Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c. 1830-2000. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Eley, Geoff. Reshaping the German Right, Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Frobenius, Else. Erinnerungen einer Journalistin: zwischen Kaiserreich und Zweitem Weltkrieg. Cologne: Bolau, 2005. Gewald, Jan-Bart, and Jeremy Silvester. Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia. Brill, Leiden, 2003. Guttmann, Barbara. Weibliche Heimarmee: Frauen in Deutschland, 1914-1918. Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlang, 1989. Ha, Marie-Paule. French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hildebrand, Klaus. Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, NSDAP, und koloniale Frage, 1919-1945. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969. Hong, Young Sun. Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919-1933. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Kundrus, Birthe, ed. Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus. Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2003. Langbehn, Volker, ed. German Colonialism, Visual Culture and Modern Memory. New York: Routledge, 2010. Louis, W. Roger. Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Naranch, Bradley, and Geoff Eley, eds. German Colonialism in a Global Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. O’Donnell, K. Molly. “French and German Women’s Colonial Settlement Movements, 1896-1904.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques (2014): 92–110. Pierard, Richard Victor. “The German Colonial Society, 1882-1914.” PhD diss. State University of Iowa, 1964. Planert, Ute, ed. Nation, Politik und Geschlecht Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus Verlag, 2000. Quataert, Jean H. Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Reagin, Nancy. Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Scheck, Raffael. “Women against Versailles: Maternalism and Nationalism of Female Bourgeois Politicians in the Early Weimar Republic.” German Studies Review 22, no. 1 (Feb. 1999): 21–42. ———. Mothers of the Nation: Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Sneeringer, Julia. Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Schmokel, Wolfe W. Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 1919-1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Schöck-Quinteros, Eva, and Christiane Streubel, eds. Ihrem Volk verantwortlich. Frauen der politischen Rechten (1890-1933). Organisationen—Agitationen—Ideologien. Berlin: Trafo Verlag, 2007.

60 • K. Molly O’Donnell Short, John Philip. Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Smith, Woodruff D. The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism. Oxford University Press, 1986. Strachan, Hew. The First World War in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Süchting-Hänger, Andrea. Das “Gewissen der Nation”: National Engagement und politisches Handeln konservativer Frauenorganisationen 1900 bis 1937. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2002. Swaisland, Cecille. Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to South Africa, 1820-1939. Oxford: Berg, 1993. Venghiattis, Claire. “Mobilizing for Nation and Empire: A History of the German Women’s Colonial Organization.” PhD diss. Columbia University, 2005. Wempe, Sean. “Lost at Locarno? Colonial Germans and the Redefinition of ‘Imperial’ Germany, 1919-1933.” PhD diss. Emory University, 2015. Wildenthal, Lora. German Women for Empire, 1884-1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

CHAPTER 3

E E E Marie Juchacz and Toni Sender Socialism, Women’s Emancipation, and Weimar Politics William Smaldone

When Jean Quataert arrived at SUNY Binghamton, my dissertation on the life of Rudolf Hilferding was well underway, and I considered myself very lucky when Jean agreed to supervise my project. An exacting taskmaster, she pushed me to think in new ways about my subject and to reconceptualize and revise many aspects of the manuscript. Most importantly, she gave me confidence. When I completed an article and wondered where to send it, she urged me to start “at the top” with Central European History, which, to my surprise, accepted it. Later, when I was looking for a job, Jean’s support was crucial, and her encouragement made those many discouraging moments much more bearable. Over the course of my career, when mentoring my own students, I have often thought of her tough-minded, constructive criticism and her steady support. For the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the German Revolution of 1918–1919 created a new political terrain upon which to pursue the goal of creating a socialist society. No longer outsiders, a majority of Social Democrats envisioned the building of this new world via transformative legislation enacted by socialist electoral majorities. By channeling class struggle into parliamentary processes, SPD leaders believed that the movement’s “great goals” could be achieved through step-bystep reforms carried out “within the limits of the possible.”1 These goals were summed up in the SPD’s Heidelberg Program of 1925, which reiterated the party’s long-standing aims of ending class rule, abolishing social classes, and creating a society based on equal rights, regardless of gender or ethnic origin.2 Social Democracy’s challenge—or, as Peter Gay put it, its “dilemma”—was to use the new democratic system to achieve these aims while simultaneously defending it against opponents intending to destroy the entire republican edifice.3 One key to the realization of the Social Democratic project was the socialist women’s movement. Since the SPD-led revolutionary govern-

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ment had granted women full suffrage, and the Weimar Constitution of 1919 declared them to be, at least “in principle,” equal to men, it was imperative for the SPD to win the backing of this massive group—a majority of the population—now ostensibly liberated from the legal, moral, and intellectual restraints that had previously hindered its members from making their own choices. No less importantly, it was essential for the party to provide a space for newly emancipated women to put forward their own visions for a society based on full gender equality and to act to realize them. As Helen Boak has observed, there is considerable disagreement among historians about the extent to which the Weimar Republic was an emancipatory experience for women.4 Some historians, such as Eric Weitz, have emphasized the ways in which new thinking about the family, sex, and women’s public roles encountered the “unrelenting attacks” of powerful social and political forces that saw women “as the cause of cultural degeneration and economic crisis,” and regarded the “new woman” of the postwar era as a threat to “the very existence of the nation or race.” These forces were able to mobilize increasingly powerful political support that effectively blocked women’s aspirations for change and eventually reversed the republic’s reforms after 1933.5 In contrast, other historians, such as Kathleen Canning and Kirsten Leng, have highlighted the opportunities and promise the republic offered to women, especially in its early years. In an essay focusing on the immediate postwar period, for example, Canning uses the lens of citizenship to show how “gender inflected the symbolics and subjectivities” of their newly won citizenship, which “was imagined, desired, and claimed in new ways.”6 In her view, 1918–1919 marked a turning point in which “women’s acquisition of citizenship rights opened possibilities for the emergence of new female subjectivities and self-representations,” a change so profound that it “made gender a site of continuous contention” until the end of the republic.7 Leng, too, sees the republic as “a laboratory for experiments in democracy, the arts, and sexual expression.”8 Her work on women sexologists between 1900 and 1933 illustrates how, in a field dominated by men, women were actively engaged in the rethinking of sex, gender, and sexuality. This process of rethinking resulted in a wide range of conclusions that pushed the boundaries of sexual science in exciting if controversial directions before being crushed by fascism. The present chapter also recognizes the promise and limitations of women’s experiences under Weimar. Shifting the focus to the sphere of women’s activity in “high politics,” it examines the experience of Marie Juchacz and Toni Sender, two of the most important leaders of the Weimar Social Democratic women’s moment. Different by class background,

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political outlook, and temperament, I argue that their cases illustrate the capacious space that Weimar Social Democracy offered to female activists committed to the advancement of women’s equality. At the same time, they show the ideological and political obstacles these activists encountered in the face of deep-seated resistance to change both inside and outside Social Democratic ranks. Ultimately, their experiences illuminate the existential dilemma faced by all SPD members as the republic’s deepening crisis narrowed their range of choices. In her pathbreaking work examining the development of socialist feminism under the Empire, Jean Quataert noted that in a society in which women were subject to male control within the family and in civil law, they were denied the right to vote or to join political organizations and were exploited in the rapidly industrializing workplace. They responded to oppression by organizing to achieve goals that were both socialist and feminist, but unlike their male counterparts, “on every level—theoretical, political, organizational, and tactical—they faced the crucial issue of how to reconcile loyalty to class and to sex.”9 In a movement dominated by male leaders for whom class struggle was the primary means for the achievement of socialism, this dichotomy embodied a paradox that socialist feminists were forced to grapple with as the Social Democratic women’s movement emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century. Socialist feminists attempted to resolve this paradox, Quataert argues, “by defining feminism in class terms.” For them, feminism became “a means to an end [socialism] . . . directed specifically to the needs of working-class women.” Only under socialism could the “women’s question” be resolved, because only the abolition of capitalist property relations could create the social conditions necessary to make real gender equality possible. In the struggle to achieve that aim, men and women in the party and its allied trade unions had to educate the masses about the contradictions between the interests of capital and the interests of male and female workers, rather than about conflicts between working-class men and women. It was this class-oriented position that Clara Zetkin, the editor of the leading socialist feminist paper Die Gleichheit (Equality), advanced at the SPD’s Gotha Congress of 1896, where it was endorsed by the party leadership.10 Zetkin and allies such as Luise Zietz dominated the socialist women’s movement in the two decades prior to the outbreak of World War I. Demanding gender equality but also asserting that men and women were not the same, they celebrated gender differences and held that women embodied certain natural characteristics, such as warmth, practicality, and sensitivity, that enriched society generally. They believed that such differences, as well as those in the biological sphere, warranted special con-

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sideration in the social and political reconstruction of a more egalitarian society. To mobilize women in support of their aims, they rejected cooperation with “bourgeois feminist” organizations.11 Instead, they sought to build a working-class women’s movement by fighting for legislative reforms to reduce gender inequality and discrimination, by promoting their participation in trade unions, and by implementing large-scale educational programs to raise working women’s class consciousness. Their efforts met with considerable success. Between 1908, when legal reforms allowed women to join political organizations for the first time, and 1914 the party recruited 150,000 women, roughly 15 percent of the total membership.12 The growth of the socialist women’s movement was accompanied by substantial internal conflicts among its leaders and between it and the SPD leadership as a whole. Some women leaders, such as Lily Braun, challenged Zetkin’s emphasis on Marxist theory and the centrality of class struggle and were sympathetic to Edward Bernstein’s “revisionist” perspective, which called upon the SPD to jettison its revolutionary identity in favor of a more reform-oriented one. They favored cooperation with non-socialist women’s groups that had similar goals to those of the socialists. Though temporarily defeated, Braun’s outlook gained ground as the party’s membership and administrative apparatus expanded.13 Another major issue for the socialist women’s movement was organizational. Due to legal restrictions prior to 1908, socialist women’s organizations arose that were autonomous from, but loosely affiliated with, the SPD. They organized separate meetings on the local level and held separate national conferences focusing on a variety of women’s concerns, such as maternity insurance, children’s education, and protective labor legislation. After 1908 women continued to hold national conferences separately, but the party absorbed their organizations into its overall structure. The results of this process were mixed. Women were more integrated into the party but were underrepresented in its leadership bodies. Their functional segregation became more pronounced as they were increasingly expected to focus on “women’s issues,” such as child labor and municipal welfare.14 For most Social Democratic men, since women could not vote and the idea of gender equality was either unwelcome or a distant abstraction, the women’s movement remained ancillary to the party’s activities. These ideological and practical conflicts continued to shape the fortunes of the socialist feminist movement in the wake of the outbreak of World War I and the Revolution of 1918–1919. The war split the socialist women’s movement just as it divided the party as a whole. When a majority of the SPD’s leaders decided to abandon their internationalist principles to support the government’s war effort and to join in the regime’s call for “civil peace”—the so-called Burgfrieden—in domestic politics,

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a minority opposed the decision. The latter drew support from across the party’s political spectrum, but its core was the radical left, which included Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and feminists such as Zetkin and Zietz. When the majority expelled the opposition in early 1917, these leaders helped found the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), from which some, including Zetkin, departed to form the Communist Party (KPD) in late 1918. Thus, these actions left the SPD’s women’s movement largely in the hands of more moderate leaders—those less interested in Marxist theory and a focus on class struggle, and more interested in practical matters of day-to-day political work.15 If the war shattered Social Democratic unity, it also created new opportunities and challenges for women as they mobilized for a wide variety of tasks on the home front. Upper- and middle-class women, long active in the spheres of social work and educational and moral reform, now acquired new authority in managing wartime family welfare policies, in the allocation of women and youth in the job market, and in the rationing of key resources such as food and fuel. At the same time, the drafting of millions of men into the military opened the doors of industries previously the preserve of male workers to working-class women, who now often became the main breadwinners for their families while still having to manage the household.16 Social Democratic women joined in these wartime efforts by engaging, for the first time, in large-scale social welfare work, which many had previously viewed as an ineffective palliative to injuries rendered by capitalism. Reflecting the more conservative attitude of the party leadership, they now worked side by side with their liberal and conservative counterparts to ameliorate wartime suffering in the interest of the nation. Indeed, despite their anger and disappointment at the SPD leadership’s support for the war, even Zetkin and Zietz backed the turn to welfare work.17 Women’s enhanced public role during the war was also reflected in their growing mass participation in protests and strikes against the deteriorating conditions of life on the home front, against the war, and for radical change. In October 1918 over fifty women’s groups had joined together and demanded that the imperial government grant women’s suffrage, but to no avail. When the regime collapsed a month later, one of the first acts of the newly formed Council of People’s Deputies (an SPD-USPD coalition government) was to grant suffrage to women and thus realize one of the socialist movement’s long-standing democratic demands. Now, for the first time, German women had the right to express themselves politically. They constituted more than half of the adult population, and it was more important than ever for Social Democracy, as it was for all other political parties, to win their support.

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Marie Juchacz and Toni Sender figured prominently in the effort to build the Social Democratic women’s movement. While each had substantially different views on Social Democratic politics and the role of women in the party leadership, they agreed about many aspects of female recruitment, and, importantly, like their forebears in the prewar generation of female party leaders, they hesitated to challenge the centrality of class in the SPD’s ideological and political outlook. Juchacz was Weimar Social Democracy’s most important female political leader. Appointed in 1916 by SPD chairman Friedrich Ebert to replace Luise Zietz as head of the party’s Office for Women’s Concerns, between 1917 and 1933 she was the only female with full membership in the party’s twenty-one-member executive committee, and she served in the Reichstag for the duration of the republic.18 She had come far. She was born Marie Gohlke in 1879 in Landsberg. Her father, Theodore, was an impoverished carpenter. After elementary school, she worked under oppressive conditions in a net factory and an insane asylum before becoming a seamstress. Juchacz’s father and older brother were active in Landsberg’s emerging labor movement, and their influence drew her toward Social Democracy. In 1903 she married a tailor, Juchacz, with whom she had two children, but the marriage soon ended. In 1906 she moved with her children to Berlin, where she lived with her sister, Elizabeth, and joined the socialist movement.19 Life was hard, but the sisters managed by sewing at home, working in a variety of apparel-producing shops, and sharing household duties. Meanwhile, involvement in socialist politics opened the door to new ideas and new activities. Hungry for knowledge and, despite her natural reticence, anxious to contribute, Juchacz began organizing reading clubs for socialist women. In 1907 she was elected chair of the Women’s and Girls’ Educational Association of Berlin-Schöneberg, and over the next six years she proved herself an effective grassroots organizer and speaker. In 1913 the SPD leadership appointed her to a paid political job as the women’s secretary of the party’s “upper Rhine” district, which included Cologne and its rural hinterland. This was a tough assignment. In relatively cosmopolitan Cologne there was a substantial population of women attracted to Social Democratic politics, but outside the city, especially in the conservative Catholic area of the Eifel Mountains, progress was slow. Juchacz attempted to adjust the party’s recruitment efforts to deal with different regional cultures and conditions. Such experience would prove useful to her in coming years.20 In 1914 Juchacz backed the SPD leadership’s decision to support the government’s war effort. In keeping with party policy, she directed the efforts of Cologne’s socialist women’s organization to aid families affected by the conflict. Instead of agitation for the promotion of socialist

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transformation, SPD women now focused on helping families deal with food and fuel shortages, childcare needs, difficulties brought on by illness or injury, and other hardships created or exacerbated by the war. Social Democratic women aimed to provide this aid in ways that avoided the humiliating treatment usually meted out to the poor by government agencies. At the same time, entering seriously into this sphere brought them into temporary cooperation with liberal and conservative women’s organizations, which had much more extensive experience and different attitudes toward “welfare” and its purposes.21 Juchacz’s prewar and wartime experiences profoundly shaped her view of the focus of Social Democratic women’s practical political work. Having come up through the ranks of the party, a skilled administrator, and more focused on organization-building than doctrinal matters, she exemplified what Quataert described as the “second generation” of female leaders who had risen into the SPD’s upper ranks.22 Following the expulsion of Zietz, Ebert offered Juchacz a post in the leadership because he recognized her loyalty to the party. His judgment was astute. Juchacz never wavered in her commitment to the SPD, despite her feeling of “horror” as the country and party mobilized for war. On the contrary, she threw herself into the SPD’s wartime work. For her, irrational nationalism had seized control of the masses and the party was swept into the war by forces it could not control. There was no real option but to carry on with the practical day-to-day work.23 As the newly appointed head of the women’s bureau, Juchacz argued vehemently that the SPD should build its female membership by deepening and expanding its activity in the sphere of social welfare. “Wherever women are active in social work,” she said, “they win the sympathy [Zuneigung] of working women” who were in difficult circumstances.24 In her view, women traditionally had been active in such work and experience had shown that “women talking to women,” especially about important, practical matters, was the most important means of expanding the party’s influence among them. The SPD should help struggling workers and their families to help themselves until such time as the socialist state could sweep away the causes of their oppression. In the process of promoting self-help, the party would win the interest of growing numbers of women, educate them about socialism, and recruit them to the movement. This strategy, developed in the midst of wartime social crisis, became the cornerstone of Social Democratic women’s policy under Weimar.25 With the coming of the revolution, Juchacz reasserted her position on the importance of women’s role in social work. Elected to the National Assembly in January 1919 and the first woman to address a Ger-

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man parliament, Juchacz argued that newly enfranchised women were now in a much stronger position to win equality in all spheres, including in public service, in the workplace, and under civil law. They were, however, also “especially suited” for work in the social sphere, in which they had a “special interest,” and she called on them to improve the rights and protection of mothers and children, to provide adequate shelter for families, and to establish unemployment insurance for workers.26 Juchacz viewed this focus on Sozialpolitik as part of the SPD’s long-term strategy to effect change. She recognized that women’s general situation remained very difficult: they were still economically dependent on men, and the Allied peace terms promised continued economic hardships for families. In the short term, she called on women to fulfill three basic tasks: to lead the way in the restoration of the German economy by increasing productivity, to combat “social chaos” by standing up for the weak and defending law and order, and to participate in the shaping of the national will.27 Juchacz’s views were in line with those of Ebert and the majority. Strongly opposed to the further radicalization of the revolution, she saw the establishment of a parliamentary republic as the fulfillment of the SPD’s primary political aim. Her outlook also did not fundamentally challenge male authority or patriarchal values within the party. She believed that the SPD had “to learn to use democracy in practical ways” and to avoid making promises it could not keep. By setting clear, realizable goals for itself and by stepping up its educational efforts, the party would garner women’s electoral backing.28 That tactic meant focusing on the sphere of social welfare, a view that reinforced the dominant attitudes of most of her female (and male) counterparts. For the next fourteen years, she and most of her female comrades focused their efforts primarily in that arena. If Marie Juchacz proved to be one of the SPD leadership’s most loyal adherents during the war and the revolution, Toni Sender, by contrast, rebelled against the party. Like Juchacz, Sender joined Social Democracy because she sought a more just society, but her background, life experience, and political attitudes were very different from those of her comrade.29 Born in 1888 in Biebrich on the Rhine, Sender came from a prosperous Jewish family. Her conservative father, Moritz, was a well-educated, “deeply orthodox” Jew who demanded obedience from his children. A successful businessman, he sent Sender to a “higher school for girls,” which, despite its focus on “obedience, always obedience!,” also provided Sender with a good basic education, especially in English and French. An excellent student, Sender graduated early at the age of thirteen and then attended a two-year commercial high school in Frankfurt am Main.30 Sender chafed at her parents’ expectation that, despite her education, she would lead a conventional domestic life. Seeking independence, she

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ignored their objections and avoided returning home after graduation by taking a job at a Frankfurt real estate firm. There she quickly won promotion, found the personal freedom she craved, and soon left Judaism and the lifestyle of her childhood behind. Sender quickly concluded that “working ten or eleven hours daily only to make profits for the firm did not seem to give more validity to my life.”31 Embarking on a search for ideals that would give her life purpose, she read widely in religion, anthropology, and philosophy, attended evening classes, and joined discussion groups. She soon became interested in the labor movement. Unfamiliar with socialist theory, she decided to join the newly organized office workers’ union because she “[did not] want to belong to the class of the idle, to the bourgeoisie,” and felt impelled “to demonstrate [her] active solidarity with labor.”32 She quickly became engaged in trade union work, took part in demonstrations for democratic electoral reforms, and began to study socialist ideas. In 1910, again over the sharp protests of her parents, she joined the SPD.33 Thus, unlike Juchacz, who had come to socialism through the influence of family and work experience, Sender came to the movement as part of a rebellion against her parents’ authority and way of life and as a result of her intellectual search for a purpose. Her decision to join the SPD caused such friction in her family that in 1910 she decided to move to Paris in order to avoid further conflict. There her knowledge of French and English served her well. She quickly found a job in the office of a Frankfurt metals firm and became active in the French Socialist Party (SFIO), in which she served as its chairperson in the city’s fourteenth electoral district. Following the outbreak of the war, she returned to Frankfurt. There, despite her socialist credentials and open opposition to the conflict, she continued working for the same firm and was promoted to run its department dealing with manufacturing and finances.34 Sender opposed the SPD’s support for the war. In the fall of 1914, she met Robert Dissmann, an energetic opponent of the war and a leader of the Metal Workers’ Union and of the Frankfurt SPD. They established a close political and personal relationship and were at the center of the antiwar opposition in southwestern Germany.35 In March 1915 Sender ignored the party leadership’s wishes and joined with Zetkin and others to organize an international meeting of socialist women in Bern, which was, in effect, the first international conference against the war. The participants issued a manifesto calling on working women to organize a movement against the war and for a peace without annexations. Sender helped smuggle the manifesto into Germany and saw to its illegal distribution. Although her apartment was repeatedly searched, she avoided arrest due to the protective influence of her boss with the police.36

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Expelled from the SPD with the rest of the opposition in January 1917, Sender then helped found the USPD, which, in her view, included “the best minds of the German labor movement” and provided the dissidents with a “new political home.”37 The following year, she threw herself into the maelstrom of revolution. When the upheaval reached Frankfurt on 7 November, she and Dissmann urged local troops to support the revolutionaries, secured the release of soldiers arrested for refusing to obey orders, convinced an assembly of factory councils to call a general strike, and saw to the arrest of the Frankfurt police chief.38 Sender also drafted a USPD manifesto, issued on 9 November, calling on Frankfurt’s workers “to use the workers’ and soldiers’ council to take control of the city until the central authority of the German social republic was secure.”39 Sender was one of the few women anywhere in Germany to win a seat on a revolutionary workers’ council. One of Frankfurt’s best-known socialist activists, she was elected secretary of its workers’ council and later won a seat in the city assembly. As editor of the local USPD newspaper Das Volksrecht (The People’s Right), Sender played an important role in Frankfurt’s politics. Unlike Juchacz, she enthusiastically supported a republic in which workers’ councils would have a permanent role. Sender believed that a workers’ revolution required creating new institutions in which working-class people could exercise power. A bourgeois-dominated Reichstag was incapable of breaking the power of the old bureaucraticmilitary apparatus or of transforming the economy along socialist lines. “New tasks required new means,” she argued, and the proletariat needed to use revolutionary workers’ councils to achieve the aims of the socialist movement.40 Well aware that women “played practically no role” in the revolutionary councils, she believed that only when women had equal representation could the councils truly reflect the will of the masses. Had women been better represented, she observed, the SPD-led provisional government would not so easily have driven women out of the workforce as the demobilized troops returned home. Looking forward, they would be in a position to carry out “the complete transformation of social law,” to end the exploitation of women on the job and at home, and to create a society in which men and women were equal partners within the family and in public life. Thus, it was incumbent on the labor movement to organize proletarian women in all spheres, including domestic workers and housewives, and Sender rejected any assertion that women were unprepared for such political tasks.41 Sender was deeply disappointed as the events of 1918–1919 undercut the councils’ movement. She sharply criticized the SPD, which favored a rapid transition to a parliamentary republic and, fearing “Bolshevism,”

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allied itself with the army and the bourgeoisie to crush the resistance of the radical left. In January 1919, when the socialist parties failed to win a majority in the elections to the National Assembly, it became certain that the new constitution, approved in June, would not be a socialist one. For Sender these defeats were the result of not only the SPD’s duplicity but also the workers’ lack of political preparedness. Since these workers had been schooled for decades to equate political freedom with parliamentary democracy, it was not surprising that they viewed the councils as transitory institutions. She remained hopeful, however. Indeed, in November 1919 she asserted that the revolution “was more alive than ever before” because the workers were learning from experience.42 She set store on a renewal of revolutionary activity in which the councils would play a decisive role in the political and economic spheres. Sender thought that the USPD could play a major role in preparing the proletariat for future revolutionary action. A tireless campaigner, she was dismayed when, just as the party stood poised to overtake the SPD in membership and electoral strength, its left wing, almost two-thirds of its membership, voted to join the Communist International and to merge with the tiny KPD in October 1920. Sender disapproved of this decision. Although sympathetic to the Comintern’s ostensible internationalism, she rejected its efforts to impose its absolute authority on revolutionary workers’ parties around the world and to further split the labor movement.43 She opted, instead, to remain in the weakened USPD. In June 1920 Sender began her career in national politics when she was elected to the Reichstag on the USPD’s list. She retained her seat when, in the face of the rising threat of counterrevolution, the SPD and the Independents reunited two years later. Although she had serious misgivings about this merger, she recognized the need for the workers’ parties to cooperate in defense of the republic. After considerable “inner struggle,” she decided that working within the party was better than political isolation.44 Thereafter she once again became a tireless, though critical, SPD activist. The USPD’s reunification with the SPD marked the partial return of the latter’s left wing. Sender was a part of this group, which, in general, had a more radical, class-struggle political perspective than the majority of the SPD’s leadership. Like Zetkin before her, Sender represented an outlook more rooted in Marxist class analysis than that of Marie Juchacz, and she often criticized the SPD’s policies from that standpoint. She agreed with Juchacz about the importance of Sozialpolitik in women’s parliamentary work, but she also believed that women parliamentarians should branch out into new fields. Indeed, her own legislative activity pushed the boundaries of female participation into spheres that were traditionally

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dominated by men. Juchacz and Sender both aimed to build the Social Democratic women’s movement as part of a larger party-building effort. Their different approaches to these aims exemplified the wide range of activity available to women within the SPD but also revealed the many external and internal factors that hindered their progress. At the time of the two parties’ reunification, the socialist women’s movement was in crisis. The revolution and the achievement of suffrage had initially suffused many women with hopes for further progress toward equality in all spheres. Large numbers joined the SPD and its trade union allies (the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund or ADGB). The number of women party members reached 207,000 (17.5 percent of the total) in 1920, an increase of over 33,000 since 1914, while female union membership grew spectacularly from 203,000 to 1,710,000 (31 percent of the total) within the same period. These gains soon evaporated, however, in the face of economic and political pressures that pushed women out of the labor force. For example, as the army demobilized, the SPD and the ADGB agreed to a policy excluding women from the workforce and giving priority to returning soldiers. Although the SPD, and, more ambivalently, the ADGB, soon reaffirmed women’s employment rights, their initial posture certainly helped fuel the decline of female membership in the party to 130,000 in 1923 and in the unions to 720,000 by 1925.45 The SPD also earned relatively tepid support from women voters. Prior to 1918 the party had done more to promote women’s equality and to organize women politically than any other, and after legalizing women’s suffrage, it expected to reap the advantage of their electoral support. Hoping that women would cross class and confessional lines to help the SPD achieve a socialist majority, the party’s early postrevolutionary campaigns reemphasized its support for women’s political equality, for the expansion of maternity and other social welfare benefits, and for the separation of church and state. Results were unsatisfactory, however. Indeed, between 1919 and 1932 the SPD consistently won the largest absolute number of German women’s votes, but party activists—both male and female—were disappointed that for most of that time a smaller proportion of women than men backed the SPD and instead gave the bulk of their support to the religious and nationalist parties of the center and right. Many male comrades criticized women’s “ingratitude” and held them responsible for the failure of socialist legislation in the Reichstag.46 Of course, women activists rejected such assertions and criticized the widely held sentiment among male party members that female recruitment should largely be left to female comrades. In response to the “gender gap” among socialist voters, the party’s female leaders debated the extent to which the SPD should stress gender rights, material concerns,

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welfare, or cultural issues in its propaganda aimed at women. While a minority held that the party should stress economic issues, most backed Juchacz’s call for approaching women differently than men. Juchacz held that not only were some women psychologically and politically less well prepared than men to deal with the postwar crisis, but they had a different relationship to the labor market and, consequently, a different conception of class solidarity, which made them harder to organize. Therefore, the party had to learn to speak to women who saw work as a temporary measure to meet household needs, who had to or wished to remain at home, and who either did not have the resources to support two party memberships or believed that one, their husband’s, was enough.47 To that end, Juchacz called for better methods of agitation and enlightenment. For example, while she believed that local party meetings should include men and women, she suggested that smaller meetings for women could speak to issues of special interest to them, such as reproductive rights, prostitution, and youth policy. She supported replacing the now-defunct Gleichheit with a new women’s magazine, Frauenwelt, which aimed to appeal to women in their “separate sphere,” especially those who were difficult to reach through agitation at political meetings, in factories, or in the daily press. It sought instead to conduct “socialist cultural work” that influenced women in their management of their households, their lifestyles, and, gradually, in their political attitudes. Most importantly, Juchacz steered socialist women’s extra-parliamentary activity into the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers’ Welfare) organization, which, operating in the private sector, came to rival more conservative women’s welfare organizations providing social services around the country. The Arbeiterwohlfahrt recruited tens of thousands of volunteer and paid workers, mostly women, who provided advice, education, and different forms of material help to millions of disadvantaged people. By focusing on improving the often-dire circumstances of the family, the organization addressed the various immediate interests particularly of working-class housewives, who outnumbered working women and whose families were far more likely to need assistance than middle-class women.48 Measures such as these, combined with electoral campaigns downplaying the SPD’s critique of religion and stressing social and reproductive themes important to women, succeeded in slowly rebuilding the SPD’s female party membership base and boosting its voter support. Between 1924 and 1931 the proportion of female members increased from 15 percent to 22.8 percent (230,000), and the rise in membership was paralleled by the elimination of the gender gap in the Social Democratic electorate. These gains did not, however, improve the SPD’s overall voting strength as the republic’s economic and political crises deepened.49

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While Juchacz strove to guide the energies of Social Democratic women along lines associated with traditional women’s interests, Sender shared in this work but also moved into different areas of activity. Following reunification, she become one of the SPD’s most versatile leaders. Still active in the Metal Workers’ Union, she edited the Betriebsrätezeitschrift (Shop Steward’s Magazine), a publication targeting the leaders of the newly established factory councils. In 1924 the SPD appointed her editor of Die Genossin (The Woman Comrade), a newsletter founded in response to activists’ demands for a publication more theoretically oriented than Frauenwelt. A few years later, after many activists had criticized Frauenwelt’s content as unserious and bourgeois, she also took the helm there. Finally, she was an important figure in the SPD’s Reichstag delegation. Unlike most of her female colleagues, however, she avoided concentrating on women’s issues. While proud of the party’s accomplishments in passing social legislation, she elected to use her financial expertise to engage in trade, foreign, and defense policy work.50 Sender was one of the very few women to take on such tasks and to win respect in these traditionally male spheres. Self-conscious about what she was doing, she later noted that “although I realized that it was my duty to participate in the solution of [women’s] problems, my special interest was in the economic sphere and in foreign affairs.” She felt that while it was much more difficult for women to gain recognition in these areas, it also was harder to mask ignorance behind oratorical skills. Sender thought that in the final analysis it was “knowledge and ability” that counted in this work, and on the whole she believed that she was successful in winning the respect of her male colleagues.51 In contrast to Juchacz, who rarely commented on matters not directly connected to women’s concerns, Sender spoke out on a wide variety of matters and did not hesitate to challenge the party leadership. In 1923 and in 1928, for example, she argued strongly against the SPD’s decision to join coalition governments that included parties of the right, because, in her view, the SPD could never achieve its long-term aims with such partners.52 It was better, she argued, to remain in the opposition where the party could “gather the whole power of the working class in decisive opposition to the bourgeoisie.” From there it would be able “to raise once again our much-diminished influence in society and in that way bring about positive changes.”53 Although clearly anchored on the SPD’s left wing, Sender was also a flexible thinker. For example, she consistently opposed the left’s call for the SPD to deny all military appropriations to the capitalist state. Instead, she argued that Germany needed some defense capability until other powerful states disarmed. What was most im-

Marie Juchacz and Toni Sender • 75

portant was for the SPD to democratize the military while simultaneously pursuing disarmament.54 Sender’s outlook on the “women’s question” and her practical work in party politics reflected the paradox of socialist women’s experience under Weimar. On the one hand, like most female comrades, Sender believed that there were specific feminine interests that the party should defend. These included helping women fulfill traditional gender roles, for example, as mothers, nurturers, and helpmeets, and could be promoted by creating new institutions (e.g., housewives associations) and passing appropriate social welfare legislation (e.g., laws forbidding forms of labor unhealthy for women and mothers and the provision of social welfare benefits by the state). On the other hand, her outlook also reflected a feminist perspective that aimed to challenge and revise the traditional social codes that had restricted women’s freedom in virtually all spheres and locked them into the status of secondary citizens.55 Sender’s experience provides an example of one woman’s push into new areas of activity without repudiating the main thrust of the Social Democratic women’s movement. In her address to the Party Congress of 1931, Juchacz presented an optimistic view of the socialist women’s movement’s progress, but she was also aware of its weaknesses. Having failed to attract many younger women, the party organization’s new female members were mainly older spouses of male party comrades, and 67 percent were housewives, rather than wage earners.56 At the same time, the party did not win many new members or voters from among non-working-class women. The reasons for these failures are complex. Internally, as Julia Sneeringer has argued, the SPD was similar to all Weimar parties in its basic assumptions about women’s political roles. Men tended to see women “as ultimately capable only of political action consistent with their ‘female nature’ (politics of the heart), while simultaneously discouraging them from deploying that femininity in way that could seriously challenge the status quo.”57 Thus, despite the imperative need to expand the movement’s political base to win socialist majorities in parliament, most SPD and trade union members did not see the full achievement of women’s equality as particularly important or even desirable, and many feared female competitors in the party and in the workplace. While the Weimar SPD accepted proportional representation of women in party committees, it dragged its feet implementing the policy, turned a deaf ear to calls for equal representation, and placed relatively few women on the party’s electoral lists. The executive regarded organizing women as the job of female comrades and assigned it relatively low priority. Thus, the effort to build Arbeiterwohlfahrt not only channeled women’s activities in directions that reaffirmed

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male authority and patriarchal values within the party, but it also lacked the resources it needed in its fierce competition with rival Catholic and Protestant welfare organizations.58 Externally, the socialist women’s movement faced strong headwinds in a society in which many women were alienated from politics or continued to harbor conservative social views. Many were certainly disaffected by the republic’s recurrent political and economic crises and its failure to achieve important reforms, such as equal rights under civil law, but large numbers also rejected aspects of the socialist program that challenged their traditional understanding of gender roles, such as its call for a woman’s right to work and economic independence. At the same time, conservative women were not attracted by elements of socialism more in keeping with traditional views of woman’s proper sphere, such as its emphasis on social work, because in that arena there were already plenty of more conservative options to choose from. Indeed, the Social Democratic women’s focus on social welfare work as a means of recruitment challenged entrenched conservative social and religious organizations on their own ground. Arbeiterwohlfahrt did much to aid poor people, but it had little political influence over welfare legislation and it did not attract large numbers of new socialist recruits.59 In this difficult situation, the leaders of the SPD women’s movement saw few options. Most shared Juchacz’s view recognizing women’s equality but also stressing women’s roles as wives and mothers. To appeal to women on the grounds that the party would struggle to improve their rights as individuals and broaden their opportunities for self-realization was not typically regarded as a viable strategy by most socialist women or men. In the early 1930s Juchacz and Sender recognized the rise of Nazism and, to a lesser extent, Communism as existential threats to the Social Democratic project. Like their male comrades in the leadership, they had no effective response to movements using parliamentary means to destroy the parliamentary order. Juchacz was not an economic or political theorist and she put forward no systematic analyses of the deepening depression or of the political crisis. Instead, her public speeches reflected her moral outrage at Nazi violence. “Women,” she argued, “want no civil war . . . [and] no war between nations.” They “see through the hollowness of a politics that portrays itself as especially masculine, but actually is derived from shortsightedness, vanity, and ambition.” Hence women had to fight against the “barbarization” of Germany and defeat the Nazi “nation destroyers.”60 Juchacz believed that as ever larger numbers of middle-class Germans sank into the proletariat, many would become anti-capitalist but also susceptible to Nazi propaganda. The SPD had to learn to understand these

Marie Juchacz and Toni Sender • 77

people, find common ground with them, and win them over. Women activists in particular had to reach out to women in order to shape their politics.61 Here we see Juchacz again advocating the tactic of “women talking to women” as the best means of recruitment, but results were not favorable. By the summer of 1932, the Nazis were making serious inroads among women voters, the majority of whom continued to give their allegiance to either the Catholic Center or to the parties of the right.62 For her part, Toni Sender responded to the crisis with a number of suggestions for specific economic and administrative reforms to ameliorate the economic crisis while also arguing for the creation of a “rational planned economy in which everyone would have bread and the right to live,” but none of these measures could be implemented as long as the SPD remained out of power and isolated.63 Tactically, she was among the few members of the party leadership willing to take radical action to save the republic. After Chancellor von Papen’s overthrow of the SPD-led government in Prussia in July 1932 and again after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship the following January, Sender demanded that the party join with its trade union allies to resist by calling a general strike, arguing that “it is better to be defeated in battle than to lose without a struggle.” In both cases, however, fearing the outbreak of a civil war they could not win, the leadership demurred.64 Within six months the Nazis destroyed Social Democracy and both Juchacz and Sender were forced into exile, ultimately ending up in the United States. Juchacz and Sender’s experiences illustrate that in the framework of Weimar’s parliamentary democracy, Social Democracy offered women a significant range of opportunities to pursue individual and collective political action to advance the cause of women and of socialism. Socialist women’s options remained limited, however, due to a variety of obstacles, some of which were carried over from the prewar period. Like the first generation of socialist feminists, the second generation was also “reluctant,” to use Jean Quataert’s term, to challenge the primacy of class in the SPD’s ideological and political orientation. The women of the Reichstag, as Helen Boak observes, “collaborated on legislation which improved women’s lives without challenging patriarchal society, they had entered parliament as representatives of their party, not of women,” and this applied to women of all parties—including the Social Democrats.65 Inside and outside of parliament, socialist women continued to subordinate their interests as women to those of the party, dominated by men largely uninterested in sharing power. While some women, such as Sender, could explore new avenues of activity in male-dominated spheres, most followed the lead of women like Juchacz, who steered socialist women onto the familiar path of maternal politics. This approach, which aimed to sup-

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port the party’s electoral strategy, ultimately was unable to resolve Social Democracy’s historic dilemma. William Smaldone is E. J. Whipple Professor of History at Willamette University. He has published several works on European socialism, including Rudolf Hilferding: The Tragedy of a German Social Democrat (Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), Confronting Hitler: German Social Democrats and the Defense of the Weimar Republic (Lexington Books, 2008), and European Socialism: A Concise History with Documents (Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd ed., 2019). His most recent work is “Freedom is Indivisible”: Rudolf Hilferding’s Correspondence with Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and Paul Hertz, 1902-1938 (Brill, 2023).

Notes 1. Rudolf Hilferding, “Wandlung in der Politik,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 31 December 1922. 2. “Programme der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, beschloßen auf dem Parteitag in Heidelberg 1925,” in Dowe and Klotzbach, eds., Programmatische Dokumente der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie, 197. 3. Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, ix. 4. Boak, Women in the Weimar Republic. 5. Weitz, Weimar Germany, 327–28. 6. Kathleen Canning, “Claiming Citizenship: Suffrage and Subjectivity in Germany after the First World War,” in Canning, Barndt, and McGuire, eds., Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects, 116. 7. Ibid., 130–31. 8. Leng, Sexual Politics and Feminist Science, 1. 9. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 12. 10. Ibid., 12–13, 68–69. 11. As Marilyn Boxer has observed, Zetkin’s use of the label “bourgeois feminist” to draw a sharp class divide between socialist and non-socialist women’s movements long remained an effective ideological barrier to political cooperation between these groups and, despite its sweeping oversimplification of their actual sociological makeup, strongly influenced historical writing on the subject until late in the twentieth century. In the analysis in this chapter, unless referring specifically to the views of Juchacz and Sender, I have elected to use terms such as “nonsocialist” or “conservative” rather than “bourgeois” feminist when discussing these groups. See Boxer, “Rethinking the Socialist Construction,” 150–51. 12. Ibid., 137–38, 148. 13. Pore, A Conflict of Interest, 18–21. 14. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 148–49. 15. Ibid., 210; Pore, A Conflict of Interest, 21, 30.

Marie Juchacz and Toni Sender • 79 16. Canning, “Women and the Politics of Gender,” in McElligott, ed., Weimar Germany, 146–47. 17. Pore, A Conflict of Interest, 37. 18. Anna Nemitz and Elfriede Ryneck also served in the executive but only had observer status. See Hagemann, “‘Equal But Not the Same,’” in Fletcher, ed., Bernstein to Brandt, 142. 19. For Juchacz’s biography, see her “Kindheit, Jugend, und erste politische Tätigkeit,” in Marie Juchacz; Roehl, Marie Juchacz und die Arbeiterwohlfahrt; Dertinger, “Marie Juchacz,” 119–43; Smaldone, Confronting Hitler, 101–18. 20. Juchacz, Gründerin, 45–66. 21. Dertinger, “Marie Juchacz,” 127–31. 22. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 220–23. 23. Juchacz, Gründerin, 70–74; Susanne Miller, “Marie Juchacz als Frauensekretärin der SPD,” in Arbeiterwohlfahrt Bundesverband, ed., Marie Juchacz: Gründerin der Arbeiterwohlfahrt. Leben und Werk (Princeton, 1979), 220–23. 24. Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Abgehalten in Würzburg vom 14-20. Oktober 1917 (Glashütten im Taunus, reprint 1917), 265–66, 441–42. Hereafter cited as SPD-Parteitag. 25. Marie Juchacz, “Berufsarbeit und politisches Interessse der Frau,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 23 (1919): 831–35; Marie Juchacz and Johanna Heymann, Die Arbeiterwohlfahrt, Voraussetzungen und Entwicklung (Berlin: Dietz, 1924), 5–9. 26. Marie Juchacz, Verhandlungen des verfassungsgebenden Reichstags, Bd. 326, Stenographische Berichte (Berlin, 1920): 177–81. 27. Marie Juchacz, Der kommende Friede (Berlin, 1919). 28. Marie Juchacz, “Rede” in Einigkeit, nicht Selbstzerfleischung. Sozialdemokratische Reichskonferenz am 5. Und 6. Mai, 1920, Vorwort von Friedrich Stampfer (Berlin, 1920), 177–81. 29. On Sender’s career, see Toni Sender: The Autobiography of a German Rebel (New York: Vanguard Press, 1939); Hild-Berg, Toni Sender. Ein Leben im Namen der Freiheit und der sozialen Gerechtigkeit (Cologne: Bund Verlag, 1994); Christl Wickert, “Sozialistin, Parliamentarierin, Jüdin. Die Beispiele Käthe Frankenthal, Berta Jourdan, Adele Schreiber-Krieger, Toni Sender, und Hedwig Wachenheim,” in Heid and Paneker, eds., Juden und deutsche Arbeiterbewegung bus 1933; Susanne Miller, “Toni Sender (1888-1964): vielseitge Erfahrungen und prakischer Idealismus,” in Lösche, Scholing, and Walter, eds., Vor dem Vergessen Bewahren, 315–31; Brunner, 100 Jahre Tony Sender; Critchfield, “Toni Sender,” 701–6. 30. Sender, Autobiography, 9–32; Hild-Berg, Toni Sender, 21–31. 31. Sender, Autobiography, 17. 32. Ibid., 26. 33. Ibid., 27–31; Hild-Berg, Toni Sender, 29–30. 34. On Sender’s stay in Paris and return to Frankfurt, see Autobiography, chapter 2, 32–59, and chapter 3, 60–65, respectively. 35. Sender, Autobiography, 65–66; Hild-Berg, Toni Sender, 39–40. 36. Hild-Berg, Toni Sender, 42–43; Brunner, 100 Jahre, 6. 37. Sender, Autobiography, 85–86. 38. Ibid., 96–105; Hild-Berg, Toni Sender, 48–52.

80 • William Smaldone 39. Brunner, 100 Jahre, 7. 40. Toni Sender, Die Frauen und das Rätesystem. Rede auf der Leipziger Frauenkonferenz am 29. November 1919 (Berlin, 1920), 5. 41. Ibid., 20–26. 42. Ibid., 17. 43. Toni Sender, Diktatur über das Proletariat oder: Diktatur des Proletariats. Das Ergebnis von Moskau (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter genossenschaftsdruckerei und verlag Volksrecht, 1920). 44. Sender, Autobiography, 199–200; Hild-Berg, Toni Sender, 86–87. 45. Hagemann, “‘Equal But Not the Same,’” 134–37. 46. Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes, 58–59. 47. Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes, 59, 93; and the speech by Gertrude Hanna at the SPD-Parteitag Weimar, 1919 (Glashütten im Taunus, reprint, 1973), 486– 99; “Reichsfrauentag,” in SPD-Parteitag Görlitz, 1921 (Glashütten im Taunus, reprint 1973): 46–49. 48. Smaldone, Confronting Hitler, 106–10. 49. Eifert, Frauenpolitik und Wohlfahrtspflege, 16; Frevert, Women in German History, 176–77; Pore, A Conflict of Interest, 34; Adelheid von Saldern, “Modernization as Challenge: Perceptions and Reactions of German Social Democratic Women,” in Gruber and Graves, eds., Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women, 97; Boak, “Our Last Hope,” 290–93; Jürgen Falter, Hitlers Wähler (Darmstadt, 1991), 140. 50. For examples of Sender’s views on social legislation, see “Die Frau im Betriebsrat,” and “Die Frau und derEntwurf eines Arbeitschutzgesetzes,” Die Genossin 3 (1926): 80–82, 134–36. 51. Sender, Autobiography, 244–45. 52. Toni Sender, Große Koalition? Gegen ein Bündnis mit der Schwerindustrie (Frankfurt am Main, 1923); Hild-Berg, Toni Sender, 95–97. 53. Toni Sender, Fünf Jahre nach der Novemberrevolution! Vortrag von Tony Sender gehalten auf dem Sächsischen Landesparteitag der USPD am 1. Dezember 1923 (Zwickau: Bezirksvorstand der USPD, 1924), 19. 54. Toni Sender, “Kritik an den Richtlinien zur Wehrpolitik,” Die Gesellschaft 1 (1929): 113–24; Hild-Berg, Toni Sender, 102; Sender, Autobiography, 248–49, 266–70. 55. On the relationship between “feminine” and “feminist” interests, see Smith, Democracy in Latin America, 244–45. 56. Hagemann, “‘Equal But Not the Same,’” 137. 57. Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes, 15. 58. Von Saldern, “Modernization as Challenge,” 97–99; Pore, A Conflict of Interest, 70–78; Eifert, Frauenpolitik, 236–39. 59. Compare Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, “Beyond Kinder, Küche, und Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work,” in Carroll, ed., Liberating Women’s History, 301–29, and Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 95–101. See also Eifert, “Coming to Terms with the State,” 25–47. 60. Marie Juchacz, Reichstag speech of 26 February 1932. Reprinted in Klaus Schönhoven and Hans-Jochen Vogel, eds., Frühe Warnungen vor dem Nationalsozialismus. Ein historisches Lesebuch (Bonn, 1998), 269–70.

Marie Juchacz and Toni Sender • 81 61. Marie Juchacz, “Genossinnen!” Die Genossin 8/9, no. 9 (August–September 1932): 194–96. 62. Boak, Women in the Weimar Republic, 109. 63. Sender, Autobiography, 284; Idem., “Liebe Leserin,” Frauenwelt (10 January 1931): 9. 64. Smaldone, Confronting Hitler, 172–73. 65. Boak, Women in the Weimar Republic, 99.

Bibliography Boak, Helen. “Our Last Hope: Women’s Votes for Hitler – A Reappraisal.” German Studies Review 12, no. 2 (1989): 289–310. ———. Women in the Weimar Republic. New York: Manchester University Press, 2013. Boxer, Marilyn. “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept of “Bourgeois Feminism.” The American Historical Review 112, no. 1 (Feb. 2007): 131–58. Brunner, Margot. 100 Jahre Tony Sender: Sozialistin, Demokratin, Rebellin, Internationalistin, Metallerin, Journalistin, Politikerin. Wiesbaden: Referat Frauenbeauftragte der Landeshauptstadt Wiesbaden, 1996. Canning, Kathleen. “Women and the Politics of Gender.” In Weimar Germany, edited by Anthony McElligott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Canning, Kathleen, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire. Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s. New York: Berghahn, 2013. Carroll, Berenice A., ed. Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976. Critchfield, Richard. “Toni Sender: Feminist, Socialist, Internationalist.” History of European Ideas 15, nos. 4–6: 701–6. Dertinger, Antje. Die Bessere Hälfte Kämpft um ihr Recht: Der Anspruch der Frauen auf Erwerb und Andere Selbsverständlichkeiten. Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1980. Dowe, Dieter, and Kurt Klotzbach, eds. Programmatische Dokumente der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie. Bonn: Dietz Verlag, 2004. Eifert, Christiane. Frauenpolitik und Wohlfahrtspflege: Zur Geschichte der sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterwohlfahrt. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1993. ———. “Coming to Terms with the State: Maternalist Politics and the Development of the Welfare State in Weimar Germany.” Central European History 30, no. 1 (1997): 25–47. Frevert, Ute. Women in German History. Oxford: Berg, 1989. Gay, Peter. The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. Gruber, Helmut, and Pamela Graves, eds. Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women: Europe Between the Two World Wars. New York: Berghahn Books, 1998. Hagemann, Karen. “‘Equal But Not the Same’: The Social Democratic Women’s Movement in the Weimar Republic.” In Bernstein to Brandt: A Short History of German Social Democracy, edited by Roger Fletcher. London: Edward Arnold, 1987.

82 • William Smaldone Heid, Ludger, and Arnold Paneker, eds. Juden und deutsche Arbeiterbewegung bis 1933, soziale Utopien und religious-kulturelle Traditionen. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1992. Hild-Berg, Anette. Toni Sender (1888-1964): Ein Leben im Namen der Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit. Cologne: Bund Verlag, 1994. Juchacz, Marie. Marie Juchacz: Gründerin der Arbeiterwohlfahrt, Leben und Werk. Bonn: Arbeiterwohlfahrt Bundesverband, 1979. Juchacz, Marie, and Johanna Heymann. Die Arbeiterwohlfahrt, Voraussetzungen und Entwicklung. Berlin: Dietz, 1924. Leng, Kirsten. Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900-1933. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Lösche, Peter, Michael Scholing, and Franz Walter, eds. Vor dem Vergessen Bewahren: Lebenswege Weimarer Sozialdemokraten. Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1988. Pore, Renate. A Conflict of Interest: Women in German Social Democracy, 1919-1933. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. Quataert, Jean. Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Roehl, Fritzmichael. Marie Juchacz und die Arbeiterwohlfahrt. Hannover: Dietz, 1961. Smaldone, William. Confronting Hitler. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008. Smith, Peter, Democracy in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Sneeringer, Julia. Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Weitz, Eric. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

CHAPTER 4

E E E Gender Anxieties and Censorship in Weimar Aufklärungsfilme and Article 118 Kara Ritzheimer

I first met Jean Quataert in 1998 as a first-year graduate student with nebulous plans to study women’s history. Jean encouraged me and my fellow students to wrestle with theory, ask big questions, challenge long-held interpretations, and, perhaps most importantly, find “our voice.” Through her mentorship, I expanded my focus to include more nuanced questions about gender, agency, identity formation, and the power of the state. As I developed a dissertation about the topic of censorship, she encouraged me to do a case study of Baden. In part because she knew the archives would be helpful; in part because she was, in her heart, a social historian. As I transformed the dissertation into a book, I broadened the project into a national study, and yet Jean’s encouragement that I consider issues from the city and state levels, not just from the federal perspective, has stayed with me. My research process now always includes city, state, and confessional archives. My current book project, which examines girls and girlhood in Nazi Germany, incorporates much of Jean’s influence, including her embrace of interdisciplinary work and her readiness to use new lenses of analysis to rethink the past. I am glad that I was able to share a part of this research with her when it was in its early stages; I only wish I had been able to show her the final manuscript. “The repeal of censorship,” Center Party representative Clara Siebert declared to her colleagues in the Badish legislature in late July 1919, “has worked like the opening of a sluice gate.” Even before the war, she explained, movies had contained far too many depictions of violence and immorality, including portrayals of murder, suicide, adultery, thievery, and harlotry. Now freed from censorship, this industry was discharging a “flood of smut” into the population and into young people’s minds. The solution, she asserted, lay in socializing the entire film industry. Only by

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separating film production from the profit motive might the nation protect its sons and daughters from film’s poisonous impact.1 Siebert delivered this damning assessment of the film industry just seven months after Germany’s transitional government, the Council of People’s Representatives (Rat der Volksbeauftragten), abolished censorship as part of a multipronged effort to democratize the nation. In a 12 November 1918 decree, the new six-person body asserted: “Censorship will not take place. Theater censorship is abolished.”2 The interim government’s simple statement soon required clarification. And so on 23 November, the interim government explained: “The Reich government has repealed every sort of censorship, therefore also film censorship.”3 With these two declarations, Germany’s transitional leadership effectively unraveled four years of military controls as well as the many laws and regulations that regional and state authorities had implemented prior to World War I. What the interim government advanced as a program for political change, activists and authorities quickly interpreted as the liberation of a commercial entertainment industry more interested in profit than popular welfare. As cultural commentator and feuilleton writer Siegfried Kracauer later argued: When, immediately after the war, the Council of People’s Representatives abolished censorship . . . the effect was not a transformation of the screen into a political platform, but a sudden increase of films which pretended to be concerned with sexual enlightenment. Now that they had nothing to fear from official supervision, they all indulged in a copious depiction of sexual debaucheries.4

As movies with titles such as Hyänen der Lust (Hyenas of lust), Verlorene Töchter (Lost daughters), and Frauen, die der Abgrund Verschlingt (Women engulfed by the abyss) percolated into local movie theaters across Germany, municipal authorities, social reformers, and state and national lawmakers increasingly expressed support for renewed regulations.5 On 31 July 1919, the same day Siebert delivered her floor speech in Baden, the National Assembly meeting in Weimar approved a new constitution that allowed for future censorship laws. The linchpin was Article 118, a qualified protection of free speech, which decreed: Within the limits of the general laws, every German has the right to express his opinion freely in words, writing, print, pictures, or in other ways. . . . There is to be no censorship, but the law may provide otherwise for motion pictures. Legal measures are also permissible to combat obscene and indecent literature and to protect the young in connection with public exhibitions and entertainments.6

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In subsequent months and years, German lawmakers capitalized on this provision to implement two national censorship laws that regulated the movie industry and the sale of Schundschriften (trashy publications) to minors. Why had German lawmakers so quickly abandoned the interim government’s sweeping abolition of censorship in November 1918? Prior scholarship has rightly identified the appearance of Aufklärungsfilme (Enlightenment films) as central to Weimar’s censorship story, but most studies stop short of explaining why these movies spurred lawmakers to reintroduce censorship. Was it because delegates to the National Assembly had only a tenuous commitment to civil liberties? Or was there something specific about these movies and social conditions in postwar Germany that persuaded lawmakers, even Socialists, to consent to the possibility of renewed censorship? The following chapter takes up this question and argues that the National Assembly’s inclusion of Article 118 in the final version of the constitution must be placed in the context of postwar anxieties about gender norms. This context helps explain why, at this particular juncture, national lawmakers were willing to facilitate regulatory controls on the movie industry (as well as publishers and retailers of “trashy” publications) that a broad coalition of social reformers, municipal authorities, and state and federal lawmakers had been championing since before World War I. These prior efforts had failed to produce binding national legislation, but they did help popularize a distinction between cultural products worthy of free-speech protections and made-for-profit movies and pulp fiction deserving of regulation.7 Likely attuned to this distinction and alarmed by the moral threat they believed “enlightenment” movies posed to Germany’s postwar recovery, lawmakers endorsed a constitution in late July 1919 that promised citizens only a modified protection of free speech.

War, Defeat, Gender, and the Postwar German Film Industry On a Saturday afternoon in late May 1919, the Apollo-Theater in Berlin hosted the German premier of Richard Oswald’s and Magnus Hirschfeld’s second cinematic collaboration, Anders als die Andern (Different from the others). The drama recounts the tragic life of its protagonist Paul Körner, who from boyhood to adulthood suffers the consequences of being a gay man in an intolerant society. Faced with blackmail and exposure, Körner sees no alternative but to commit suicide. The film’s closing sequences took direct aim at Article 175 of the Criminal Code, Germany’s anti-sodomy statute.8

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Anders als die Andern emerged during a moment of remarkable political and social change in Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II had recently abdicated, transitional political leaders had pronounced Germany to henceforth be a republic, and lawmakers were busily crafting a new national constitution. The film also emerged at a time when Germans were taking stock of the war’s demographic impact. Conscription had mobilized 13.2 million men, approximately 85 percent of all men eligible for military service. When the war ended, nearly 8 million German men were still performing active service, over 2 million had been killed, and as many as 4.8 million wounded.9 These fatalities produced a worrisome gender imbalance.10 Already by 1919, women outnumbered men by 2.2 million. A 1925 census revealed that women continued to outnumber men by over 2 million.11 The war had also created uniquely different war experiences for men and women. In his 1927 assessment of the war’s impact on morality, Otto Baumgarten noted that soldiers deployed to the front found themselves “unnaturally separated from their homes and their families.”12 Many men experienced the trenches of the western front to be remote, isolating, and sexually frustrating places.13 These cramped spaces could be emasculating. As Adam Stanley explains, soldiers “found themselves confined in close quarters, huddled in underground bunkers, and crammed into narrow trenches.”14 Meanwhile, strategies of attrition and mechanized warfare prohibited these men from fulfilling preconceptions of masculinity in which brave soldiers won battles through heroic actions.15 Conversely, war generated a modest increase in women’s employment and relocated many female workers into wartime manufacturing jobs.16 The war also transformed at least four million women into single mothers, now responsible for parenting, caring for, and feeding their families.17 Anxiety about the profound social changes the war had wrought found expression in hand-wringing about sexuality. While moralist Bruno Grabinksi credited the war with initially deepening religiosity and selflessness, the lengthier it became, he explained, the more it fueled licentiousness and depravity. He devoted much of his 1917 text Weltkrieg und Sittlichkeit (World war and morality) to detailing this immorality among women. He argued that while even before 1914 female immorality had reached astonishing depths, the problem had only worsened within the first weeks of war. An alarming number of soldiers’ wives were being unfaithful, German girls and women were consorting with prisoners of war, and women were wearing indecent, distinctly un-German clothing. His text even contained reproductions of nearly one hundred articles, culled from newspapers across Germany, recounting the dire consequences of women’s dishonorable behaviors.18 Male infidelity likewise vexed moral-

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ists, but they tended to approach this issue more from the perspective of social hygiene than public morality. Medical doctors, sex reformers, military authorities, and women’s groups worried that soldiers who engaged in extramarital sex would contract gonorrhea and syphilis and bring these diseases back home to their wives and future children.19 In reality, rates of venereal disease did not noticeably increase among soldiers. Yet worry about transmission gave rise to social hygiene films in several combatant nations. In Germany, Richard Oswald collaborated with the German Society to Combat Venereal Disease in 1916 to produce a drama about syphilis titled Es werde Licht! (Let there be light!). Britain’s War Office helped produce the film Whatsoever a Man Soweth (1917) while America’s War Department funded Fit to Fight (1918), a movie that details the dangers and consequences of venereal disease.20 To a certain degree, heterosexual prostitution, a potential source of venereal disease, found acceptance as a natural outgrowth of war; German military authorities went so far as to provide frontline soldiers with access to brothel prostitutes.21 Conversely, psychiatrists and doctors identified nonnormative and nonheterosexual expressions of male sexuality as abnormal. In isolating men at the front, Baumgarten noted, war had stripped men of opportunities to copulate with “the other softer, sentimental sex.” This constant and forced sexual austerity consequently manifested itself in “abnormal stimulations and reactions.” Members of the medical community cautioned that isolation in the trenches and sustained exposure to death and destruction were contributing to sexually deviant behaviors, namely homosexuality, masturbation, and sexual violence. Historian Jason Crouthamel notes that doctors warned during the war that “the psychological stress of combat, in particular, the experience of killing” was generating an “epidemic of sexual trauma.”22 Magnus Hirschfeld, conversely, rejected war as a cause of homosexuality. He maintained instead that “an unusual number of homosexuals [had] streamed into the army and voluntarily joined the ranks.”23 But while Hirschfeld argued against a causal link between war and homosexuality, he and others drew a direct connection between war and sexual violence, a pathology they warned would become a domestic issue once men returned home to their wives.24 During and after the war, psychiatrists, doctors, moralists, criminologists, and authorities worried that these war-induced changes in men and women’s sexual ethics might obstruct, either by choice or inability, men and women’s adherence to traditional gender norms. Idealized notions of masculinity ran contrary to a war in which men deployed to the front experienced isolation and confinement.25 German doctors adopted the term “war hysteria,” a deeply negative and female-gendered diagnosis, to classify the range of symptoms that soldiers experiencing posttraumatic stress

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disorder exhibited.26 Soldiers who had been injured or mutilated in war returned home with broken bodies that in many cases were incapable of manifesting masculinity or even demonstrating physical control, let alone independence.27 Meanwhile, stories of unfaithful wives dislocated idealizations of the model wife who “maintain[ed] the ‘normalcy’ of home and hearth until the men returned.”28 The war instead seemed to have freed women and provided them with greater access to public spaces, paid employment, and, in the immediate aftermath of defeat, the right to vote. The postwar myth of the “New Woman” embodied contemporary fears that these newly liberated and increasingly financially independent women would reject marriage and motherhood.29 As the war drew to a close, policy makers attempted to restore traditional gender norms through labor policy. The war had mobilized millions of male breadwinners, drawn women into the workplace, and instigated, as Young-Sun Hong explains, “a widely perceived ‘crisis of the family.’”30 The armistice of 11 November 1918 required German leaders to rapidly demobilize nearly eight million men. By January 1919 they had returned seven million men to civilian life.31 Policy makers, trade unions, employers, and state governments sought to reemploy veterans by removing women from the industrial labor force. To do so, national leaders renewed protective labor legislation on 7 November 1918. These policies restricted where and when women could work. The following day, the government issued guidelines suggesting that companies terminate women who either had other means of financial support or might find employment in sectors experiencing a labor shortage or jobs deemed more appropriate for women. Nearly immediately, unions and employers agreed. Such policies favored a male breadwinner model and pushed women into more traditional employment and, in many cases, back into the home.32 Censorship, meanwhile, offered lawmakers a legal tool for controlling men and women’s consumption of gender-subversive imagery, such as that being peddled by “enlightenment” movies. The film industry collectively produced approximately a hundred fifty of these typically profitable Aufklärungsfilme.33 These movies’ financial success drew relatively unknown directors into the industry and fueled the production of movies engineered to draw and shock audiences.34 The genre’s ability to generate quick revenues proved attractive to moviemakers concerned by conversations taking place among municipal, state, and federal authorities regarding the communalization of movie theaters and the socialization of the film industry.35 In the end, many titles and advertisements were more risqué than the movies they promoted. In most cases, good won out over evil and characters found the greatest joy in traditional marriages and parenthood.36

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Despite these movies’ conservative characteristics, contemporaries identified them as a wellspring of public immorality. Perhaps because the interim government had so deliberately repealed censorship at the national level, reformers and moralists telescoped their focus on these films’ local impact. In Freiburg, for example, a spate of newspaper articles, petitions, and complaints to local authorities describing these movies’ impact on gender behaviors appeared in summer and fall 1919. In a July 1919 article, Dr. Engelbert Krebs, a professor of theology at the University of Freiburg, accused these films of perpetuating vice and spreading moral contamination.37 Another article complained that Die Prostitution (Prostitution, 1919), the fourth film in Oswald’s Es werde Licht! series, glorified sex work.38 Siebert, the Catholic state legislator who advocated communalization in Baden, likewise identified Die Prostitution as a lamentable outgrowth of the “enlightenment” genre that unfortunately was popular with local audiences. During her 31 July 1919 floor speech, she recounted how it was possible to walk along Kaiserstrasse, one of Karlsruhe’s main thoroughfares, and see hundreds of young people standing outside the Luxeum Theater, waiting for the next showing of this movie.39 Just days later, the Karlsruher Tagblatt published an article describing Die Prostitution as an example of the smut this cinematic genre was disseminating. Even worse, the author added, was Das Paradies der Liebestollen (Paradise of the love-stricken), a movie that included scenes of “nearly naked women and girls.”40 Critics warned that these movies might further undermine prewar gender norms by portraying behaviors that contravened traditional masculine and feminine ideals. For example, a Freiburg city councilor and Center Party member complained that films depicting the desires and sorrows of “harlots” were encouraging immature boys and girls to see brothels as preferable to the “poor life of the working citizen.”41 A month later, nineteen women’s organizations in Freiburg, a mixture of confessionally, politically, and professionally diverse groups, signed a petition asserting that Aufklärungsfilme were propagating “a spirit of idleness and hedonism, brothels and prostitution.” Furthermore, they argued, these movies objectified women and were thwarting a return to “healthy moral sentiments.” They warned that such depictions threatened to undermine the restoration of marriage in postwar Germany.42 In a December 1919 article, Krebs once again contended that the postwar film industry was churning out movies disrespectful to women and marriage.43 Postwar anxieties about men and women’s capacity, readiness, and willingness to marry and form families, an institution deemed critical to national recovery, served as a backdrop to these criticisms. On a fundamental level, families operated as sites of reproduction. War had dimin-

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ished this function by accelerating a decrease in birth rates, fueling an upsurge in divorce rates, and creating a noticeable surplus of women.44 Families also served as sites of socialization. Nineteenth-century liberal theory held that “the family was the institution through which civil society reproduced itself.” Yet, as Elisabeth Domansky explains, the war had stripped families of this function and “dissolved” the family as a bourgeois and patriarchal institution.45 Furthermore, men and women both performed and received distinctively gendered identities within the family. Nineteenth-century gender norms described men as rational, strong, virile, and courageous individuals who exerted control over their passions and bodies.46 These same norms painted women as loving, intuitive, sympathetic creatures well suited to a domestic sphere where they could practice the ideals of cleanliness and order.47 War amplified public interest in this particular function of the family, especially when psychiatrists and journalists suggested that here, in this gendered institution, soldiers suffering from the physical and psychological damage of war might stabilize both their sexuality and masculinity.48 The postwar film industry, particularly Aufklärungsfilme that showcased prostitution and extramarital female sexuality, threatened the restoration of this family model. It is worth considering the profound dislocations and deep emotional angst that fueled these anxieties about gender norms, the family, and the poisonous impact of “enlightenment” films. In the span of a few months, German citizens had lived through defeat, revolution, the kaiser’s abdication, and the birth of a new republic. In the winter and spring of 1919, they suffered inflation, coal shortages, and persistent food shortages, the latter made worse by the British government’s decision to maintain its blockade of the North Sea until June of that year. One can easily imagine the anxiety parents felt as they struggled to feed children who after years of malnourishment were, by all measurements, shorter and thinner than they should have been.49 Families who had lost a breadwinner in the war—either a son, a brother, a father, or a husband—surely faced even sharper struggles. Moreover, many Germans had the palpable sense that morals were shifting and that many of the regrettable transformations supposedly unleashed by war—juvenile delinquency and waywardness, infidelity, promiscuity, and a general disrespect for authority—were now flourishing in a nation wrecked by defeat, revolution, and profound loss.50 Nearly a decade and a half of anti-“trash” activism enabled critics of Aufklärungsfilme to characterize the unregulated entertainment industry as a social threat requiring government intervention. In part, these prewar efforts gave postwar campaigns a powerful rhetorical arsenal from which to forge their arguments. Critics were quick to label “enlightenment” films alternately as Schund (trash) and Schmutz (filth), two terms

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crafted prior to 1914 and refashioned during World War I until they had come to signify worthless and potentially damaging commercial entertainments. But war’s end had added a new layer of meaning as these terms increasingly implied corruptive movies and publications whose existence signified an abuse of the freedoms granted by the interim government. As they had before and during the war, critics accused moviemakers and publishers of succumbing to capitalistic greed in their business practices. Krebs, for example, complained to readers in Freiburg that avarice drove film production.51 Another commentator in this southwestern region accused cinema owners of prioritizing profits over public welfare, identifying a readiness among these business owners to amass their treasonous “Judas wages” by showing indecent films to local audiences.52 The director of Freiburg’s municipal stage theater similarly complained that Aufklärungsfilme were purely business films (Geschäftsfilme) that cinema owners were using to generate bankable profits.53 Like their prewar predecessors, activists in Weimar characterized movies and pulp fiction as potential social threats. But war and defeat modified the meaning of this language, particularly as critics warned that these commercial entertainments had the capacity to derail Germany’s postwar recovery. Krebs claimed that these movies represented a greater national threat than the postwar devaluation of the currency or the food shortages that continued to plague the nation. Elsewhere, he went so far as to repeat speculation that the nation’s enemies, namely Britain, were behind these films, hoping that their immoral content would domestically weaken and further enervate Germany. Even if such conjecture was unfounded, he explained, these enlightenment films constituted a “continuous stream of poison” capable of destroying the nation’s future.54 Using analogous language, a Socialist newspaper in Freiburg asked its readers, “Must we really just stand by with clenched fists as souls that have been sickened by the brutality of war are inundated with disgusting, infectious sewage?”55 Similarly, forty-eight women’s organizations in Heidelberg that had banded together against Aufklärungsfilme jointly declared film to be a cesspool (Sumpf ) “corroding the moral health of the population and consequently undermining the future of our fatherland!”56 Catholic social reformers likewise contended that the erasure of all moral restraints by these movies would make reconstruction more difficult.57 Such despairing comments insinuated that unless state and federal authorities took immediate action, Aufklärungsfilme and the unregulated film industry would stunt the nation’s ability to rehabilitate and regenerate itself. Nothing typified this threat more palpably than dire predictions of the impact these films might have on young moviegoers. Siebert warned

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that these films could infiltrate young people’s minds and permanently alter their behavior. One of her Socialist colleagues in Baden’s legislature similarly declared that one night spent watching such movies could “emotionally [seelisch] destroy a young person for their entire life.”58 Critics drew clear links between youth, film censorship, and Germany’s recovery. As one Socialist newspaper commented, these discussions concerned the nation’s future. Reiterating a line used by participants in youth salvation campaigns since the turn of the century, the author asserted, “Who has the youth, has the future.”59 Pressured by widespread support for renewed censorship, municipal and regional authorities contemplated which regulatory tools they might use to monitor and control local movie theaters. As early as December 1918, authorities in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior upheld the interim government’s 12 November repeal.60 Testing this decree’s thoroughness, in February 1919 the Badish Interior Ministry instructed district officials to monitor local film programs and designate as “impermissible” (unzulässig) “screenings of immoral and indecent images as well as [scenes] of crimes and other events that could operate a brutalizing or corruptive impact on the viewer.”61 In March 1919 police in Berlin contended that the interim government’s repeal did not preclude them from ensuring that film showings complied with criminal law, especially provisions relating to questions of morality.62 Theater owners fought back by arguing that these measures violated the totality of the interim government’s repeal. A December 1918 preliminary draft of Germany’s new constitution vindicated these complaints, for it asserted simply: “Censorship will not take place.”63 Theater owners could also take solace in a decision the Reich Interior Ministry issued in early 1919 declaring that no form of film censorship was permissible, although federal authorities clarified that local authorities could enforce age restrictions limiting admission.64 If censorship is a conservative measure intent on preserving an ideal that has become an “established orthodoxy,” and censorship is, as Margaret Stieg argues, “associated with periods of change and disruption, when existing institutions and elites are perceived to be in danger,” then these postwar endorsements of film censorship need to be interpreted as an effort to conserve traditional gender norms.65 Underlying these criticisms were assertions that “enlightenment” movies were likely to further erode already tenuous gender norms deemed crucial to the nation’s demographic and moral recovery. These associations transformed censorship from a legal question into a social and cultural issue. They also gave this debate a renewed urgency as lawmakers converged in the city of Weimar to negotiate Germany’s constitutional future.

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Censorship in the “Most Democratic Democracy in the World” On 19 January 1919, 83 percent of the men and women eligible to vote in the wake of the interim government’s declaration of universal suffrage went to the polls to select their delegates for a constitutional convention that convened in Weimar in early February.66 Over the next six months, this assembly drafted a constitution that transformed the nation into a democratic republic, recognized popular sovereignty as the source of state power, and, in an effort to shore up traditional gender norms, opened the door to future censorship laws. As the National Assembly completed its constitutional work in the summer of 1919, Reich Interior Minister Eduard David congratulated its members for having transformed Germany into the “most democratic democracy in the world.”67 For not only did the new constitution establish political and economic democracy and acknowledge its citizens’ political and social rights, but it also endowed women with full political rights and legal equality. German jurist Herbert Kraus contended that this document had given expression to what he termed the “democratic ideal,” “far more,” he argued, “than in the Constitution of the United States of America.”68 French commentator René Brunet likewise contended that the National Assembly had applied the principal of national sovereignty “to a greater extent than any other country in the world.”69 And yet, even at the time, some commentators discerned within this new constitution only a tepid protection of individual liberties. Part II, a section that itemized the fifty-seven Fundamental Rights and Duties of German citizens, contained language reminiscent of classical liberal theory, which championed individual liberties. The section titled “The Individual Person” guaranteed equality before the law (Article 109), the inviolability of personal freedoms (Article 114), the inviolability of one’s home (Article 115), secrecy of correspondence (Article 117), and freedom of speech (Article 118). But as Kraus observed, several of these Fundamental Rights “contain[ed] numerous back exits and limitations.” He described them as “more effective at the first glance” than “in reality.” Furthermore, he noted, Clause 48 of the constitution permitted the president to suspend during times of emergency “no less than seven liberal Fundamental Rights,” including many of the aforementioned rights (Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153). Given the insecure existence of these liberal rights, Kraus concluded that “Germany today cannot really be called a liberal State any more.”70 Brunet likewise observed that within the document, “personal liberty is conditioned.”71 Initially, the assembly had appeared intent on maintaining the interim government’s elimination of censorship. A provisional draft of the new

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constitution, authored by Dr. Hugo Preuss and made public on 20 January, included a provision (Article 21) that declared: “Every German has the right to express his opinion freely by word of mouth, writing, printing or picture, in so far as there are no provisions of the criminal law to the contrary. . . . A censorship is not had.”72 Despite lobbying efforts on behalf of the film industry, subsequent drafts contained language that modified the government’s prior stance by locating a regulatory entry point through the rubric of youth protection.73 A subsequent draft of the constitution, submitted by the government to the National Assembly on 21 February, replaced Article 21 with Article 32. The latter maintained the first sentence word for word but replaced the second sentence, “A censorship is not had,” with the statement: “A censorship and, especially a previous exhibition of theatrical and moving-picture productions are not had. The protection of young persons in cases of moving-picture productions and other public performances remains left to statutory regulation.”74 This exception reflected the assembly’s intention to enlarge the federal government’s social welfare obligations. On 18 June the assembly’s constitution subcommittee submitted another draft for consideration that included a revised and renumbered article (§117) that contained language allowing for future censorship laws.75 In its entirety it read: Every German has the right, within general statutory limitations, to express his opinion freely by word of mouth, writing, printing, picture or otherwise. No relationship of labor or employment may hinder him in this right, and no one may wrong him if he makes use of this right. A censorship is not had; however, divergent provisions for moving pictures may be made by statute. And statutory measures are permissible for the suppression of trashy and obscene literature, and for the protection of young persons in public performances and exhibitions.76

This language gave future lawmakers permission to draft censorship laws aimed at protecting both youth and adults from movies and pulp fiction. In mid-July, the assembly debated a proposed amendment, submitted by three representatives from the German Democratic Party (DDP), which would have revised this article so as to reassert the republic’s commitment to freedom of expression, particularly for adults, and limit future legislators to only passing censorship laws that would protect youth. The proposed language read: “Legal measures are permitted to protect young people from trash and filth in word, writing, and image as well as in public exhibitions, performances or films.” The assembly rejected the amendment in a 16 July 1919 vote, thereby preserving the draft version. In the final constitution, Article 117 became Article 118 in its entirety. In maintaining this language, lawmakers created a modified protection of

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free speech, one that both distinguished between film and free speech and legalized future censorship laws that might limit the consumption choices of both adults and young people. The final sentence underscored the premium that lawmakers placed on youth welfare during the constitutional drafting process.77 At the time, legal commentators explained the constitution’s qualified protection of civil rights by pointing to the realities of politics. After all, the National Assembly consisted of delegates representing five major parties, all serving different constituencies. British commentator Heinrich Oppenheimer observed that many clauses “were born of compromises” produced by competing political interests. Brunet asserted that the men and women who negotiated this listing remained “party men” bound by “party considerations.” As a result, Oppenheimer went on to describe this section of the constitution as a “vessel of Pandora,” filled with “prospective gifts for everybody who cares to ask.” He even suggested that the convention adopted this listing of rights to “counteract, as far as possible, the effects of war propaganda which had represented the German nation as a race of barbarians, by exhibiting before the world at large a miniature picture of German civilization, as reflected in the mirror of German law.”78 These jurists would have done well to also consider the social and cultural context in which these debates took place. As the National Assembly crafted this qualified protection of free speech, movie theaters in towns and cities across Germany were screening “enlightenment” films. In late March of that year, for example, newspapers in Karlsruhe carried advertisements announcing that the Welt-Kino, located along one of the city’s main thoroughfares, was showing “the major Aufklärungsfilm” Frauen, die der Abgrund Verschlingt.79 In May, another nearby theater, Palast-Lichtspiel, advertised upcoming showings of the “enlightenment” film Der Weg, der zur Verdammnis führt. 2. Teil (The path that leads to damnation: Part II), also known as Hyänen der Lust (Hyenas of lust).80 That same month, Oswald and Hirschfeld’s Anders als die Andern premiered in Berlin.81 The fact that both supporters and opponents of language in Article 118 permitting future censorship laws referenced this genre of films strongly indicates that by mid-1919 these movies had become an important cultural factor. One advocate of future regulatory laws, representative Ernst Oberfohren, a member of the German National People’s Party (DNVP), asserted that, since the revolution, the cinematic industry had been churning out movies dealing with themes and topics that it had previously avoided, namely the lives of “harlots” (Dirnen), prostitution, and, worst of all, “shameless ‘genre pictures’” depicting the “perverse

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atmosphere of big city life.” Perhaps he was making an implicit reference to Anders als die Andern. “No one should be uncertain,” he continued, “that these screenings are carrying an endless stream of filth (Schmutz) into our homes, that they are, above all else, likely to destroy a sense of shame and decency in our youth, and to throw masses of Germans into the arms of venereal diseases and prostitution.”82 But perhaps an even better measure of the shadow these films cast over the constitutional process is the condemnation they received from politicians who championed an unqualified protection of free speech. Representative Otto Nuschke (DDP) opposed film censorship but did concede that the movie industry had shown a preference for films dealing with “sexual problems.” He concluded, “One can only describe it as a sad degeneration of our times.” Representative Oskar Cohn, an Independent Socialist, rejected the proposed constitutional article on the grounds that future lawmakers would use it to introduce political censorship. Yet he likewise agreed with his DNVP colleague, Oberfohren, that moviemakers and theaters owners had abused the freedoms the interim government had granted them to produce and display “prostitution films and the like.” The entire business, he asserted, was “a cultural outrage of the first degree.”83 The degree to which gender anxieties animated delegates as they debated the nation’s future is perhaps best evidenced by debates surrounding the composition of Article 119. Located in the subsection titled “Social Relations,” this article reflects lawmakers’ ambition to transform Germany into a Sozialstaat (social people’s state) and to make access to “the services of the welfare state,” as Detlev Peukert explains, “a basic right of German citizens.”84 The article, in its final form, read: Marriage, as the foundation of family life and of the maintenance of the increase of the nation, stands under the especial protection of the Constitution. It rests upon the equal rights of the two sexes. To foster the purity, soundness, and social progress of the family is a function of the state and of the communes. Families with many children have a right to claim the protection and care of the state. Motherhood has a right to claim the protection and care of the state.85

The constitutional committee’s draft version (originally numbered Article 118) asserted that marriage enjoyed special constitutional protections as the “foundation of German family life” and as the “source of the preservation and increase of the nation.” It tasked states and communities with ensuring “the recovery, purity and social promotion of the family” and declared that “families with many children” had a right to financial assistance.86 In mid-July 1919 the National Assembly debated a series of amendments to this draft version; many delegates sought to extend rights

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and protections to illegitimate children and single mothers. These two topics elicited extensive commentary about contemporary social conditions. Representative Elisabeth Röhl, a Socialist, argued on behalf of a “modern constitution” that would recognize the reality of single motherhood. Representative Agnes Neuhaus, from the Center Party, rejected any language that might equalize the status of legitimate and illegitimate children. Such a step, “in our times,” she asserted, would be “disastrous.” Arguing that the lengthy war had operated a “devastating” impact on society, she asserted that the path to recovery lay in strengthening marriage, not in tearing down a “protective wall.” Any constitutional effort to extend rights to illegitimate children would place extramarital and marital relations on equal footing and mark the beginning of a “national decline.” One of her colleagues, representative Eduard Burlage, reasserted the Center Party’s condemnation of extramarital sexual relations as “sinful” and “reprehensible” as well as its rejection of any “modern trend” that might normalize them. In debating how far illegitimate children’s rights should extend, delegates, especially those on the political right, seized the opportunity to assert their commitment to marriage, an institution both grounded in and likely to reproduce traditional gender norms.87 Although Article 118 focused on freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and Article 119 extended protections to marriage, family, and motherhood, these two constitutional articles had similar origins and connected fates. Lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle justified the adoption of language facilitating future censorship laws by referencing the ubiquitous presence of Aufklärungsfilme, their deleterious impact on morality and traditional institutions, namely marriage, and their capacity to derail the nation’s recovery. Supporters who endorsed Article 119 saw within it an opportunity to shore up marriage as a foundational institution and heal society. Lawmakers ultimately adopted two different yet complimentary strategies to achieve the same goal: a resetting of traditional gender norms. As the new constitution assumed the force of law, critics of the film industry set to work to build support for a national film law. Proponents pointed to Article 119 as justification for their activism. In early October 1919 representative Joseph Joos of the Center Party called for legislation that would both contain “trash” literature and battle the film industry’s worst excesses. He premised his demands on Articles 118 and 119. That same day, members of the DNVP submitted an interpellation asking the government whether, in light of the responsibilities Articles 119 and 122 placed on the state (to protect the family, marriage, and youth), and the regulatory opening Article 118 now offered, it was considering legal steps to combat the “grave circumstances” the country was now experienc-

98 • Kara Ritzheimer

ing.88 Several days later, another DNVP delegate, representative Reinhard Mumm, submitted another interpellation posing the same question.89 Within months, the National Assembly was considering a draft that eventually became the May 1920 Reichslichtspielgesetz (National Motion Picture Law). Supporters framed the law as a means for both combating the “enlightenment” film genre and fulfilling the new government’s social welfare mandates. This proved to be a heady combination that persuaded even Socialists, who described the film law as a “stopgap measure” that would free the population from cinematic depictions of “filth” and “brutality,” to endorse the law.90 Once again, concern for traditional gender norms tipped the scales in favor of regulation. Aufklärungsfilme were a key factor in Weimar’s censorship story, not only because politicians, reformers, and activists on all sides of the political aisle found them offensive but also because a majority of lawmakers deemed their existence a threat to the traditional gender norms they believed essential to healthy marriage rates, increased birth rates, the restoration of the family, and even soldiers’ reintegration into society. Weimar’s turn to censorship is less a story of poor statesmanship and more a tale of good intentions gone wrong. Lawmakers believed commercial entertainments would undermine recovery; they saw in censorship an opportunity to fulfill their new social welfare commitments. Only by contextualizing Article 118 in the climate of postwar Germany and the constitutional process can we understand why the new constitution gave censorship legal footing in this new democratic republic. Kara Ritzheimer earned her PhD from Binghamton University in 2007 and is an associate professor of history at Oregon State University. Her research areas include twentieth-century Germany, mass culture, censorship, childhood, and girlhood. In 2016 she published “Trash,” Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany (Cambridge University Press). She has also published chapters on youth policy during World War I and the intersection of gender and censorship in Weimar Germany. Her current research focuses on Nazi youth groups and girlhood in Nazi Germany.

Notes 1. Badische Landtag, 42. öffentliche Sitzung, 31 July 1919, 1627-1630, Stadtarchiv Freiburg (StAF), C4/XII/30/6. 2. “Aufruf des Rates der Volksbeauftragten an das deutsche Volk. Vom 12. November 1918,” http://www.documentarchiv.de/wr/1918/rat-der-volksbeauftragt

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

en_ar.html; Otis H. Fisk, Germany’s Constitutions of 1871 and 1919 (Cincinnati, OH: Court Index Press, 1924), 94–95. Steakley, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic,” 189. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 44. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 44; Franz H. Schönhuber, “Keine Filmzensur? Eine Denkschrift für den Bilderbühnenbund Deutscher Städte,” 1919, Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe (GLAK) 235/16200. Blachly and Oatman, Government and Administration of Germany, 666. Ritzheimer, ‘Trash,’ Censorship, and National Identity, 104–18. Steakley, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic,” 181, 186–92. Bessel, Germany after the First World War, 5, 6, 8; Weitz, Weimar Germany, 8–9. Bessel, Germany after the First World War, 9. Daniel, The War from Within, 133; Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 6; Boak, Women in the Weimar Republic, 201, 203. Baumgarten, “Der sittliche Zustand des Deutschen Volkes unter dem Einfluss des Krieges,” 36. Crouthamel, “Cross-dressing for the Fatherland,” 199. Stanley, Modernizing Tradition, 3. Todd, “‘The Soldier’s Wife Who Ran Away with the Russian,’” 260. Daniel, The War from Within, 38–49. Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land, 137. Grabinski, Weltkrieg und Sittlichkeit, 137, 141, 146–51, 168, 175. Doan, “Sex Education and the Great War Soldier,” 642; Baumgarten, “Der sittliche Zustand des Deutschen Volkes unter dem Einfluss des Krieges,” 38; Grabinski, Weltkrieg und Sittlichkeit, 67. Bessel, Germany after the First World War, 236–37; Steakley, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic,” 189; Doan, “Sex Education and the Great War Soldier,” 641; Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 68. Boak, Women in the Weimar Republic, 30. Baumgarten, “Der sittliche Zustand des Deutschen Volkes unter dem Einfluss des Krieges,” 36–39; Crouthamel, “Male Sexuality and Psychological Trauma,” 61. Hirschfeld, The Sexual History of the World War, 129; Crouthamel, “‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship,’” 116. Crouthamel, “Male Sexuality and Psychological Trauma,” 73. Stanley, Modernizing Tradition, 3. Lerner, Hysterical Men, 61–62. Kienitz, “Body Damage,” 187–88. Todd, “‘The Soldier’s Wife Who Ran Away with the Russian,’” 277. Roos, Weimar through the Lens of Gender, 5. Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation, 74; Hong, “The Contradictions of Modernization in the German Welfare State,” 253. Weitz, Weimar Germany, 20–21. Boak, Women in the Weimar Republic, 22, 135; Rouette, “Mothers and Citizens,” 53–54. Hohmann, Sexualforschung und- aufklärung in der Weimarer Republik, 71. Smith, “Richard Oswald and the Social Hygiene Film,” 14–15.

100 • Kara Ritzheimer 35. Malte Hagener and Jan Hans, “Von Wilhelm zu Weimar: Der Aufklärungs- und Sittenfilm zwischen Zensur und Markt,” in Hagener, Geschlecht in Fesseln, 10. 36. Hagener and Hans, “Von Wilhelm zu Weimar: Der Aufklärungs- und Sittenfilm zwischen Zensur und Markt,” 8; Smith, “Richard Oswald and the Social Hygiene Film,” 19. 37. Bütow and Rombach, “Engelbert Krebs,” 131; Dr. E. Krebs, “Die Totengräberarbeit unserer Kino-Bühnen,” clippings, 11 July 1919, Stadtarchiv Freiburg (StAF), C4/XII/30/6. 38. “Aus der Stadt Freiburg. Verseuchungsgesellschaften ohne Pflicht und Haftung,” Volkswacht, 2 August 1919, StAF, C4/XII/30/6. 39. Badische Landtag, 42. öffentliche Sitzung, 1627. 40. Alex Büttner, “Die Dekadenz des Films,” Karlsruher Tagblatt, 2 August 1919, Stadtarchiv Heidelberg (StAH), Sozialamt 1791. 41. “Selbstschutz der Stadtgemeinde gegenüber den sittlichen Gefahren der Freiburger Kinovorführungen betreffend,” Dringlicher Antrag der Zentrums-Stadtverordneten in Freiburg to the Stadtrat der Hauptstadt Freiburg, 20 October 1919, StAF, C4/XII/30/6. 42. “Betr. Vorgehen gegen das Kinounwesen,” to the Stadtrat der Hauptstadt Freiburg, zur gefl. Weitergabe an den Bürgerausschuss, 3 November 1919, Freiburg, StAF, C4/XII/30/6. 43. Engelbert Krebs, “Gemeinde und Lichtspielbühne,” Tagespost, 27 December 1919, StAF C4/XII/30/6. 44. Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk, 4–5. 45. Domansky, “The Transformation of State and Society in World War I Germany,” 58; Domansky, “Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany,” 436. 46. Mosse, The Image of Man, 22–23, 59, 75–79, 144. 47. Hausen, “Family and Role-Division,” 55–56; Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation, 42–43. 48. Crouthamel, “Male Sexuality and Psychological Trauma,” 78–79. 49. Cox, Hunger in War and Peace, 181–90. 50. Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic; Weitz, Weimar Germany, 11–12. 51. Krebs, “Die Totengräberarbeit unserer Kino-Bühnen.” 52. “Gegen Schmutz und Schund,” Freiburger Bote, 24 October 1919, StAF, C4/ XII/30/6. 53. “Kommunalisierung der Kinos betr.,” Intendanz des Stadttheaters to the Stadtrat Freiburg, 27 September 1919, StAF, C4/XII/30/6. 54. Krebs, “Gemeinde und Lichtspielbühne”; Krebs, “Die Totengräberarbeit unserer Kino-Bühnen”; Howard, “The Social and Political Consequences of the Allied Food Blockade of Germany, 1918-19,” 161–62. 55. “Aus der Stadt Freiburg. Verseuchungsgesellschaften ohne Pflicht und Haftung.” 56. “Zur Kino-Reform,” Heidelberger Tagblatt, 9 November 1919, StAH, Sozialamt 1791. 57. Zum Kapitel: Schmutz in Freiburg,” Freiburger Tagespost, 31 July 1919, StAF, C4/XII/30/6. 58. Badische Landtag, 42. öffentliche Sitzung, 1627-1628, 1634.

Gender Anxieties and Censorship in Weimar • 101 59. Linton, “Who Has the Youth, Has the Future”, 1; “Aus der Stadt Freiburg. Verseuchungsgesellschaften ohne Pflicht und Haftung.” 60. Steakley, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic,” 190. 61. “Die Überwachung der Kinematographentheater betr.,” Badisches Ministerium des Innern to Ministerium des Auswärtigen hier,” 17 February 1919, GLAK, 233/12667. 62. Amtshauptmannschaft in Döbeln to the Kreishauptmannschaft Leipzig, doc. nr. 260A, 4 March 1919, Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden (HStAD), Ministerium des Innern (MdI) 10736, Sektion 17, Nr. 11337. 63. Eva Sturm, “Von der Zensurfreiheit zum Zensurgesetz: Das erste deutsche Lichtspielgesetz (1920),” in Hagener, Geschlecht in Fesseln, 64. 64. Baden’s Interior Minister explained the federal government’s position during the Badish legislature’s discussion of communalization. Badische Landtag, 42. öffentliche Sitzung, 31 July 1919, 1632. 65. Stieg, “The 1926 German Law to Protect Youth against Trash and Dirt,” 23. 66. Koch, A Constitutional History of Germany in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 262. 67. “Reichsminister des Innern Dr. David,” in 10 Jahre Weimarer Verfassung, 3–4. 68. Kraus, Crisis of German Democracy, 51. 69. Brunet, New German Constitution, 75. 70. Kraus, Crisis of German Democracy, 102, 98–103; emphasis in the original; Blachly and Oatman, Government and Administration of Germany, 652, 664– 67, 673. 71. Brunet, New German Constitution, 204. 72. Fisk, Germany’s Constitutions of 1871 and 1919, 263. 73. Steakley, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic,” 190. 74. Fisk, Germany’s Constitutions of 1871 and 1919, 263; Verhandlungen des Reichstages, “Entwurf einer Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs,” Aktenstück Nr. 59 (Nationalversammlung), http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_wv_bsb0 0000019_00066.html; Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 127. 75. Verhandlungen des Reichstages, “Mündlicher Bericht des 8. Ausschusses über den Entwurf einer Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs,” Aktenstück Nr. 391 (Nationalversammlung), http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_wv_bsb0000 0020_00003.html. 76. Fisk, Germany’s Constitutions of 1871 and 1919, 172–73. 77. Verhandlungen des Reichstages, “Abänderungs-Anträge Nr. 549” (Nationalversammlung), 11 July 1919, http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_wv_ bsb00000021_00363.html; Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 58. Sitzung (Nationalversammlung), 16 July 1919, 1590-1597, http://www.reichstagsprotokolle .de/Blatt2_wv_bsb00000012_00131.html. 78. Oppenheimer, Constitution of the German Republic, 181, 177–79; Brunet, New German Constitution, 196–97. 79. Badische Presse, 31 March 1919, 6, https://digital.blb-karlsruhe.de/blbz/ periodical/pageview/2024774. 80. Karlsruher Tagblatt, 10 May 1919, 8, https://digital.blb-karlsruhe.de/blbz/ periodical/pageview/2521332.

102 • Kara Ritzheimer 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88.

89.

90.

Steakley, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic,” 188. Nationalversammlung, 58. Sitzung, 1592. Nationalversammlung, 58. Sitzung, 1590, 1593. Peukert, Weimar Republic, 131. Blachly and Oatman, Government and Administration of Germany, 666. Verhandlungen des Reichstages, “Mündlicher Bericht des 8. Ausschusses über den Entwurf einer Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs,” 18 June 1919, Aktenstück Nr. 391 (Nationalversammlung), 11, http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_ wv_bsb00000020_00003.html. Nationalversammlung, 58. Sitzung, 1600-1602, 1608-1609. Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 92. Sitzung (Nationalversammlung), 7 October 1919, 2907D. http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_wv_bsb00000014_ 00047.html. Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 100. Sitzung (Nationalversammlung), 16 October 1919, 3163B. http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_wv_bsb000000 14_00303.html. Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 162. Sitzung (Nationalversammlung), 15 April 1920, 5167-5171, http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_wv_bsb000000 17_00119.html.

Bibliography Baumgarten, Otto. “Der sittliche Zustand des Deutschen Volkes unter dem Einfluss des Krieges.” In Geistige und Sittliche Wirkungen des Krieges in Deutschland, edited by Otto Baumgarten, Erich Foerster, Arnold Rademacher, and Wilhelm Flitner. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1927. Bessel, Richard. Germany after the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Blachly, Frederick F., and Miriam E. Oatman. The Government and Administration of Germany. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1928. Boak, Helen. Women in the Weimar Republic. New York: Manchester University Press, 2013. Brandt, Allan. No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Brunet, René. The New German Constitution, translated by Joseph Gollomb. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922. Bütow, Kerstin, and Siegfried Rombach. “Engelbert Krebs: Dogmatiker, Priester, Wissenschaftler und Seelsorger.” In Sankt Märgen: Eine Spurensuche: Zehn Begegnungen, edited by Kerstin Bütow, Ulrich Nocke, and Siegfried Rombach, 131–39. St. Märgen: Verlag der DesignConcepts, 2004. Cox, Mary E. Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany, 19141924. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Crouthamel, Jason. “Male Sexuality and Psychological Trauma: Soldiers and Sexual Disorder in World War I and Weimar Germany.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 1 (2008): 60–84.

Gender Anxieties and Censorship in Weimar • 103 ———. “‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and Militarisation in Germany’s Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War.” Gender & History 23, no. 1 (2011): 111–29. ———. “Cross-dressing for the Fatherland: Sexual Humour, Masculinity and German Soldiers in the First World War.” First World War Studies 2, no. 2 (2011): 195–215. Daniel, Ute. The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War, translated by Margaret Ries. New York: Berg, 1997. Domansky, Elisabeth. “The Transformation of State and Society in World War I Germany.” In Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework, edited by Amir Weiner, 46–66. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. “Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany.” In Society, Culture, and the State in Germany 1870-1930, edited by Geoff Eley, 427–64. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Donson, Andrew. Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Doan, Laura. “Sex Education and the Great War Soldier: A Queer Analysis of the Practice of ‘Hetero’ Sex.” Journal of British Studies 51, no. 3 (2012): 641–63. Grabinski, Bruno. Weltkrieg und Sittlichkeit: Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Weltkriegsjahre. Hildesheim: Franz Borgmeyer, 1917. Grossmann, Atina. Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hagener, Malte, ed. Geschlecht in Fesseln: Sexualität zwischen Aufklärung und Ausbeutung im Weimarer Kino 1918-1933. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2000. Hausen, Karin. “Family and Role-Division: The Polarization of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century—An Aspect of the Dissociation of Work and Family Life.” In The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, edited by Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee, 119–42. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981. Hirschfeld, Magnus. The Sexual History of the World War. New York: Cadillac Publishing, 1941. Hohmann, Joachim S. Sexualforschung und- aufklärung in der Weimarer Republik. Berlin: Foerster, 1985. Hong, Young-Sun. “The Contradictions of Modernization in the German Welfare State: Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform in First World War Germany.” Social History 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–70. Howard, N. P. “The Social and Political Consequences of the Allied Food Blockade of Germany, 1918-19.” German History 11, no. 2 (1993): 161–88. Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. Kienitz, Sabine. “Body Damage: War Disability and Constructions of Masculinity in Weimar Germany.” In Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-

104 • Kara Ritzheimer Century Germany, edited by Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, 181–204. New York: Berg, 2002. Koch, H. W. A Constitutional History of Germany in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Longman, 1984. Kraus, Herbert. The Crisis of German Democracy: A Study of the Spirit of the Constitution of Weimar. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1932. Lerner, Paul F. Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Linton, Derek S. “Who Has the Youth, Has the Future”: The Campaign to Save Young Workers in Imperial Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Mouton, Michelle. From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimar and Nazi Family Policy, 1918-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Mosse, George. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Oppenheimer, Heinrich. The Constitution of the German Republic. London: Stevens and Sons, 1923. Peukert, Detlev K. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, translated by Richard Devenson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Reagin, Nancy R. Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ritzheimer, Kara L. ‘Trash,’ Censorship, and National Identity in Early TwentiethCentury Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Roos, Julia. Weimar through the Lens of Gender: Prostitution Reform, Woman's Emancipation, and German Democracy, 1919–1933. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Rouette, Susanne. “Mothers and Citizens: Gender and Social Policy in Germany after the First World War.” Translated by Pamela Selwyn. Central European History 30, no. 1 (1997): 48–66. Smith, Jill Suzanne. “Richard Oswald and the Social Hygiene Film: Promoting Public Health or Promiscuity?” In The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy, edited by Christian Rogowski, 13–30. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Stanley, Adam C. Modernizing Tradition: Gender and Consumerism in Interwar France and Germany. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Stieg, Margaret F. “The 1926 German Law to Protect Youth against Trash and Dirt: Moral Protectionism in a Democracy.” Central European History 23, no. 1 (1990): 22–56. Steakley, James D. “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders als die Andern.” Film History 11, no. 2 (1999): 181–203. Todd, Lisa M. “‘The Soldier’s Wife Who Ran Away with the Russian’: Sexual Infidelities in World War I Germany.” Central European History 44, no. 2 (2011): 257–78. Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Zentralverlag. 10 Jahre Weimarer Verfassung: Die Verfassungsreden bei den Verfassungsfeiern der Reichsregierung. Berlin: Zentralverlag, 1929.

PART II

E E E Mobilizing Human Rights

CHAPTER 5

E E E Victimhood and the Politics of Memory The Expulsions of Danube Swabians from Yugoslavia, 1944–1948 Ute Ritz-Deutch

When I first met Jean Quataert in 1995, she was working on her book Staging Philanthropy (2001), incidentally doing research in Karlsruhe, Germany, my hometown. I was fortunate that Jean agreed to mentor me, and I have benefited greatly from her sharp intellect and unwavering support, which was crucial since I was also a mother of three. She taught me a great deal about German nationalism and the importance of transnational and multilayered perspectives. When I first started to research the Danube Swabians, this history was little known outside that community, and Jean was excited that I returned to the topic, this time analyzing it from a human rights perspective, which she cared about deeply. While this chapter is not a “gendered analysis,” it is firmly grounded in the historical memory of the women in my family, who—like millions of others—had to pick up the pieces in the wake of the war. It has been said that our identity is based on the stories we tell about ourselves. Not only are these constructed from a collection of memories that may not constitute a cohesive whole, but our perspectives also change over time, and identities are always in the process of being reshaped. Among the family stories that affected me profoundly as a child growing up in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s were the recollections of my mother’s family, especially those of my great-grandparents. They spoke of back home, the Heimat they lost at the end of World War II and their village of Kischker (Bačko Dobro Polje or Kiskér), a small farming community in the Batschka (Bačka), which is part of Vojvodina, today in northern Serbia. Our ancestors had settled there in the “Hungarian lands” of the Austrian Empire in the 1780s.1

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My mother’s family identified not only as Danube Swabians (Donauschwaben) but also as refugees (Flüchtlinge), and would do so until their last days, even though they had been living in Germany for many decades. For them Kischker would always be a paradise lost, the Heimat where real community existed, and everyone lived in harmony.2 Needless to say, such utopian memories contradict the reality of everyday living and also denied my grandmother’s experiences, who had lost her husband on the Russian front in her early twenties and never spoke a word about it. In October 1944, just as my mother was turning six years old, most of the family, which at that point consisted of women and children, fled Kischker for war-torn Germany, just a few days before the Soviet Army reached the Batschka. My great-grandmother, who chose not to flee, ended up in the Jarek concentration camp, one of more than eighty such camps in Vojvodina where German civilians were interned. With the help of locals, she was able to escape to Hungary and slowly made her way to Germany, earning money from farm work along the way. My great-grandfather was a prisoner of war in Russia, who like many others did not immediately return after war’s end. It took years and the help of the International Red Cross for the surviving family members to be reunited. Danube Swabians were among the estimated thirteen to fifteen million ethnic Germans who were forced out of eastern and southeastern Europe after the war, which at the time was the largest “population trans-

Figure 5.1. • Author’s mother, aunt, and grandmother, ca. 1946 © Ute Ritz-Deutch.

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fer” in world history, and today would be described as ethnic cleansing.3 Collectively they comprised an estimated 20 percent of the postwar population in occupied Germany, and like millions of other expellees, they were not made to feel welcomed.4 How to make sense of this history? As a German born after the war, I was affected by what has been termed “second-generation guilt,” but it was also clear that my family was traumatized and that my mother was a victim suffering from what we now call posttraumatic stress disorder. How was it possible for people living side by side to suddenly be turned against each other, committing horrendous acts of violence against their former neighbors? How can atrocities like the Holocaust happen? How can some people believe that others do not deserve to exist? Both of these traumatic histories not only shaped my identity but also contributed to me becoming a historian interested in human rights and immigrant rights. Sadly, today the world is experiencing the greatest refugee crisis since World War II, with more than 100 million people displaced (many of them internally) and over 27.1 million internationally recognized as refugees.5 Clearly, human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, and the killing of civilians have remained a stark reality, which makes it even more important to understand this history. The goal of this chapter is to set the expulsion of the Danube Swabians into historical context, examine the politics of memory in postwar Germany and Yugoslavia, and make a human rights argument that what happened to the Danube Swabians constituted human rights violations and war crimes. The purpose of this chapter is not to compare the suffering, legitimize revanchism, or equate the expulsions of ethnic Germans with the Holocaust. Rather it seeks to understand the expulsions in their complexity, calls for an understanding that recognizes the inherent dignity of all people, and appeals for legal protections of minority populations everywhere.

Danube Swabians in Historical Context Prior to World War II, Europe was much more ethnically mixed than after the war, and most countries had significant minority populations, especially in eastern and southeastern Europe. The presence of ethnic Germans in those regions was considerable, and those who settled in southeastern Europe were a part of larger migration movements stretching back hundreds of years. During the eighteenth century, the Habsburg Monarchy, after prolonged warfare against the Ottomans, embarked on a massive settlement project that brought more than a hundred thousand

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German speakers into the so-called Hungarian lands and granted them considerable privileges.6 While some of the Germans settled in ethnically mixed communities, other villages, including Kischker, were nearly ethnically homogeneous, with villagers retaining their German language and customs. They were citizens of the Austrian (and after 1866 the AustroHungarian) Empire until it was dismembered after World War I. With the peace treaties, millions of ethnic Germans suddenly found themselves outside of the empire’s territory. It was at that point that the various groups of Germans living in southeastern Europe, who by then numbered around 1.5 million people, came to be collectively known as Danube Swabians, even though they were originally comprised of numerous German ethnic groups. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ethnic Germans came under the jurisdiction of Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, respectively, where they were often referred to simply as Swabians or Germans.7 They immediately became a minority of tenuous legal status within the newly created Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (after 1929 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), a state dominated by Slavs, who had previously felt oppressed.8 Even though the Paris peace agreements called for the protection of minority rights, Yugoslavia did not incorporate such protections into its constitution, and subsequently, Danube Swabians became subject to a wide range of discrimination, including restrictions on German schools, associations, and publications.9 Not surprisingly, these measures only strengthened ethnic identity among Germans, and in 1920 they founded the Swabian German Cultural Association (Schwäbisch-Deutsche Kulturbund; hereafter Schwäbische Kulturbund) in Novi Sad.10 Given the erosion of rights and status, some Danube Swabians, especially the younger generation, became susceptible to Nazi propaganda, which would have devastating consequences during World War II.11 After the Nazis and Hungarians occupied Yugoslavia in April 1941, the country was dismembered, and Vojvodina came under several different jurisdictions. The Batschka was annexed to Hungary, the Srem became part of the fascist Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska or NDH), and the Banat was turned into an autonomous region of Nazi-occupied Serbia (known as the Territory of the German Military Commander—Serbia), albeit the Banat was under the control of the Wehrmacht rather than the collaboration government in Belgrade. In addition to war and occupation, the people of Yugoslavia also suffered through a civil war, in which the three main factions—the loyalist Chetniks (Četniks), the fascist Ustasha (Ustaša), and the Communist Partisans—often fought each other more viciously than the occupiers.

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Map 5.1. • Map Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, 1941–1943. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

As elsewhere in Europe, those who collaborated with the occupiers had their own goals and agendas, which they were able to pursue because the power dynamics in their communities had changed.12 In August 1944, after Romania switched sides and joined the Allies, the Soviet Army was able to quickly cross into Yugoslavia, which significantly hampered Germany’s efforts to evacuate German civilians. On 21 November 1944, after Tito’s Partisans took control of Yugoslavia, the Antifascist Council of National Liberation Yugoslavia declared in the decree of Jajce that German properties could be expropriated because

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Map 5.2. • Vojvodina during Axis occupation by PANONIAN. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

German Yugoslav citizens had undermined the communist resistance movement and were enemies of the state.13 Germans (except those who had fought with the Partisans) were treated as collaborators with the enemy, and in mock trials thousands of people were found guilty and subsequently executed, even if concrete evidence of their guilt was lacking.14 Between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred thousand ethnic Germans—mostly children, women, and the elderly—who had failed to flee were placed in concentration camps, where casualty rates were extremely high due to starvation and lack of medical attention. These were ad hoc camps, often abandoned villages fenced in and surrounded

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by armed guards who prevented people from leaving in search of food. Treatment at these camps was often brutal, although some individuals tried to intervene. Anna, one of the German women interned in Pančevo and Gakovo, described how her (future) Hungarian husband was initially able to get her out of the camp by claiming she was his common-law wife, since being in a mixed marriage could protect Germans. However, once he was drafted into the military, she had to return to the camp, where their child was born and where she remained until April 1947.15 The provisional government would have preferred to expel the Germans and demanded from the Allies an “officially sanctioned population transfer as was the case in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.”16 However, the Allies repeatedly refused these requests, and Germans remained in the camps until they were finally disbanded in 1948, after the prisoners’ land and property had been redistributed. The Allies did, however, give in to Soviet demands for forced labor as a form of “reparation in kind.”17 More than ten thousand civilians (mostly women) were sent to labor camps in the Soviet Union, from where many did not return until a decade later, if at all. Membership in the Schwäbische Kulturbund was considered sufficient reason to detain, torture, and execute people.18 It made no difference whether individuals had previously helped their Serb neighbors. By the time hostilities had ceased in Yugoslavia in 1945, more than one million were dead: 530,000 Serbs, 192,000 Croats, 103,000 Bosnian Herzegovinian Muslims, 80,000 Danube Swabians, 57,000 Jews, 25,000 Slovenes, and 18,000 Roma.19 Within a few years, the German population in Vojvodina dropped from 340,000 to 30,000.20 Without a doubt these events were traumatic, and some of these actions fit the legal definition of ethnic cleansing. However, as these statistics demonstrate, Danube Swabians were not the only group that experienced significant loss of life. From the perspective of many expellees, what happened to the Danube Swabians was genocide.21 However, there was no single government directive ordering the killings; rather, different groups were involved in the execution of Germans, and sometimes it is not clear who gave the ultimate orders. Among the list of responsible groups are the military courts of the Partisans and its infamous security agency OZNA, Peoples Courts (which also targeted Hungarians to avenge the occupation), Local People’s Liberation Committees, and individuals and spontaneous groups that formed with Russian soldiers.22 The vast majority of those who were expelled and whose property was expropriated were indeed ethnic Germans; however, the communist regime also targeted people of other ethnic groups, such as Hungarians or

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Slavs, who were propertied or opposed to communism. In other words, this ethnic conflict was part of the political and economic restructuring of the country. While ethnic cleansing operations clearly took place and extrajudicial executions do constitute war crimes, it is more difficult to argue that the expulsions rise to the internationally recognized definition of genocide.23

Politics of Memory in Germany It is understandable that the Danube Swabians wanted to have their suffering acknowledged. However, considering the atrocities of the Nazi regime, which killed soldiers and murdered civilians by the tens of millions, it seemed impossible for any German to claim victimhood after the war. Such assertions could easily be interpreted as efforts to equate their suffering with the six million Jews who perished in concentration camps. Another problem with memory production was that many publications avoided culpability and tried to project ethnic Germans as having been completely innocent, conveniently forgetting that in the early days of the war many were enthusiastic supporters of Nazi Germany, cheering as the Wehrmacht occupied their host countries.24 Postwar narratives of ethnic Germans generally skipped over the war and began their stories with the arrival of the Red Army, when they experienced vicious acts of revenge.25 In the early days of the Federal Republic (West Germany), surveys were sent out to ethnic Germans asking them to begin their testimony with the arrival of Soviet troops, thereby formalizing this trajectory. While many nurtured and even embellished memories of their lost Heimat, few of those laments made reference to Hitler or National Socialism.26 Eye-witness testimonies of German expellees have since then been published in the eight-volume Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mittel Europa (Documentation of the Expulsion of the Germans from East-Central Europe), a project sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and Victims of War (Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte).27 Similarly, Leidensweg der Deutschen im Kommunistischen Jugoslawien (The Germans’ Path of Suffering in Communist Yugoslavia) is a massive four-volume compendium of testimonies.28 Both these works compiled in horrifying detail how the expulsions were carried out, and there is no doubt about their general accuracy. Corroborating evidence can be found in the records of the Red Cross, the United Nations, Western diplomats and journalists, and most importantly the expelling countries themselves.29 Unfortunately, the final

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result of the Dokumentation with its careful selections and omissions was more a propagandistic exercise than a work of objective or comparative scholarship.30 While the historians on the project initially attempted to set the expulsions in a larger context of population transfers initiated by the Nazis, the project’s sponsors rejected such efforts, fearing that this could excuse or justify the expulsions at the hands of the Allied countries.31 The scholarship about the expulsions and the way in which expellee groups were accepted or rejected very much depended on the political climate in West Germany, as it does on that of unified Germany today. As Lora Wildenthal has shown, human rights actors in West Germany mobilized human rights language for different goals and purposes; one was to educate Germans on the atrocities of the Nazi regime in order to foster greater commitment to human rights principles, whereas another was seeking recognition for German victims of expulsions and Allied occupation. These goals could be contradictory, and some of the authors were politically compromised, including the jurist Otto Kimminich, who published extensively on the rights of expellee groups but failed to acknowledge that some of them supported Nazism and the antisemitism central to its ideology.32 Several of the advocacy groups have also been controversial. The League of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen; hereafter League), which is the umbrella organization for expellee groups, has played a key role in recent debates about German suffering, and the League’s agenda has periodically caused alarm in neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic. In 1990 and 1991 the League voted against the Border Treaty and against the Neighborhood Agreement with Poland. Influenced by the Sudeten German lobby, the Bavarian minister president Edmund Stoiber objected to the Czech Republic’s entry into the European Union, unless it repealed the so-called Beneš Decrees, which had legalized the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia.33 Unfortunately, the unresolved legal efforts by some expellees (including the extremist Preussische Treuhand) to obtain restitution and compensation continue to disturb the relationship between Germany and its neighbors.34 Needless to say, such claims are not supported by the German government. Even within Germany there are signs that the Nazi past has not been fully reckoned with, despite the proliferation of Holocaust museums, commemorations, and memorials. Since the end of the Cold War archives in the former Eastern Bloc became available and scholarship about World War II has shifted to the East, shedding new light on previously taboo or understudied topics, some of it disturbing. When an exhibit titled War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–1944 toured Germany and Austria in the 1990s, many visitors found it hard to accept that the

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soldiers were complicit in the Holocaust and other atrocities in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.35 It was one thing to accept that crimes had been committed by Nazi leadership and the SS; it was quite another to accept that a national army of some twenty million soldiers were complicit and that many of their relatives back home must have known about it.36 Another controversy was started in 2003 by the League and its planned Center Against Forced Migration (Zentrum gegen Vertreibung). Critics were concerned that a memorial commemorating the expulsion of ethnic Germans could be used to minimize Nazi atrocities and equate the suffering of the expellees with the Holocaust.37 In 2006 the Center opened an exhibition titled Erzwungene Wege (Forced paths) in Berlin, which has since then toured the country.38 According to the Center’s stated goal, the mission is to denounce expulsions and genocide, to stand in solidarity with victims around the world, and to foster reconciliation with neighboring countries. Despite the stated intent, the exhibit’s content remains controversial because, as Bill Niven has noted, “its presentation and interpretation of history were selective, tendentious and ideological,” and rather than foster conciliation, it may exacerbate tensions.39 Very disturbingly, the exhibit claims that in Yugoslavia, those ethnic Germans who did not flee were supposedly “not aware of any crimes committed against their Yugoslav neighbors,” but nonetheless experienced the brunt of the Yugoslavs’ hatred.40 While denial and deniability were necessary for soldiers and civilians everywhere after the war, claiming that those who stayed behind were not aware of any crimes committed against non-Germans in Yugoslavia is highly suspect. They may well not have felt personally guilty of any wrongdoing, but many of them must have been aware of the atrocities happening in their communities, just as Germans in the Reich knew that the concentration camps existed in Poland, even if not everyone knew about the details. Denials such as these give credence to critics who have argued that expellee organizations are revisionist. Since so many published recollections of ethnic Germans were almost exclusively focused on their own suffering, it is even more important to resituate these accounts into their broader historical context. Claiming, as Erzwungene Wege does, that Germans in Yugoslavia were not aware of any crimes is unconscionable.41 To begin with, Nazi influence among ethnic Germans in Hungary and Yugoslavia started long before the war, and these developments were alarming to their neighbors. Throughout the 1930s Danube Swabians in the Batschka had been exposed to German youths from the Reich, by housing thousands who came as part of the Nazi Party’s agricultural service (Landdienst) or taking in children evacuated from high-risk areas as part of the Kinderlandverschickung.42

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On a very personal level, then, ethnic Germans were exposed to German citizens as well as Aryan ideology, which did not go unnoticed. In the late 1930s, after the Schwäbische Kulturbund was taken over by the pro-Nazi Renewal (Erneuerer) movement, Nazi influence over local youths became even more pronounced. They “assembled at weekly gatherings in uniforms, participated in physical training, marched on public grounds, sang Nazi songs, learned about their own importance in ‘the völkisch renewal,’ and—ultimately—participated in Germany’s war effort.”43 According to one local Nazi publication, by 1943 up to 90 percent of Batschka’s youth had joined the Hitler Youth. In the early 1940s more than 90 percent of the German adults belonged to the proNazi Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn which after the occupation of the Batschka in 1941 also subsumed the Schwäbische Kulturbund there. Membership in these organizations became increasingly mandatory.44 Considerable numbers of Danube Swabians were also recruited into the German Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. In Allied countries such as Hungary and Romania, and in the Independent State of Croatia, which was a Nazi satellite, diplomatic and legal formalities regarding ethnic German recruitment were still nominally honored. Agreements set “quotas” for recruitment into the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS, which was under Himmler’s jurisdiction.45 However, the situation in the Banat was very different, since it was part of occupied Serbia. Here, recruitment of ethnic Germans was easiest since the territory was administered by the Wehrmacht.46 After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, recruitment of Banat Germans commenced in earnest, but while enlistment was officially characterized as voluntary, it was de facto obligatory. In February 1942 Himmler gave an order that “people of German ancestry who failed to register themselves on the Deutsche Volksliste could be sent to concentration camps.”47 On 1 March 1942 Sepp Janko, leader (Volksgruppenführer) in the Banat, officially announced that military service was obligatory for ethnic Germans.48 The same month, the Seventh Waffen-SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen was officially founded, and by the end of the war more than twenty thousand Banat Germans had been recruited, representing nearly all able-bodied men.49 It would become one of the most infamous fighting forces not just in the Banat but also in the NDH. Testimony of some of the atrocities committed in Croatia made their way into the records of the International Criminal Tribunal at Nuremberg.50 While joining the German forces was not voluntary, there were different degrees of participation, and some of the Danube Swabians reportedly joined in dispossessing and shooting their Serb, Jewish and

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Roma neighbors. As early as September 1941, Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Oberkommando of the Wehrmacht, had ordered that for every German soldier killed by insurgents in occupied territory, fifty to a hundred “communists” were to be executed in retaliation.51 In occupied Serbia if quotas could not be reached, Jews or Roma were killed instead. Without the collaboration of locals, the Nazis would not have been able to kill so many people in such a short time.52 The German sources commemorating the plight of ethnic Germans barely acknowledge the existence of the Prinz Eugen division, and if they do, they quickly deflect responsibility. According to Mirna Zakić, Danube Swabians carried out the administration and policing in the Banat on the Nazis’ behalf, and also “helped carry out the Holocaust and Aryanization.”53 From her perspective it is troubling that Danube Swabians who escaped the country were able to “achieve a measure of vindication” in postwar German narratives as victims of the war, of communism, and also of Nazism.54

Shifts in Yugoslav and Serbian Historiography While narratives from the expellee community often paint a black-andwhite picture in which these individuals are unquestionably innocent victims, the opposite has been true in the historical writings of postwar Yugoslavia, in which all ethnic Germans were collectively held responsible for atrocities committed not only by locals but also by the occupation forces. This version of historical memory production made it possible for the Yugoslav government to deflect blame from other groups. As Emily Greble notes, after World War II, “control of the past was essential to solidifying new regimes and helping societies heal from the traumas of war and genocide.”55 Governments played a pivotal role by monitoring historical production and public narratives of the war, and in these efforts Yugoslavia “echoed the pan-European process.”56 Granted, the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS contributed to the carnage in Yugoslavia; however, atrocities were also committed by the Chetniks, Ustasha, and Partisans. In fact, in the NDH the Ustasha reportedly killed more than six hundred thousand people (out of a million casualties in Yugoslavia), among them Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet in the postwar founding myth of communist Yugoslavia, ethnic Germans were all labeled as traitors, while only a handful of individual Serbs and Croats were put in that category.57 By not examining the atrocities committed by the Ustasha, the Chetniks, the Partisans, and others, the Yugoslav government was able to reduce animosity toward Croats, create an image that none of the

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Serbs were fascists, and claim that the dispossession of German property was justified. The latter was also key to making postwar agrarian reforms possible and to reward veterans with land. For political and military leaders in Yugoslavia, the aftermath of war was “a convenient window of opportunity for ‘adjusting’ the ethnic structure in specific regions.”58 While the census of 1931 registered 21 percent of Vojvodina’s population as German, in the census of 1948 their numbers had dropped to 1 percent.59 The almost complete disappearance and collective expropriation of ethnic Germans “were the physical and economic preconditions for the agrarian reforms.”60 Indeed, as a result of these measures, Danube Swabians “contributed” almost 80 percent of the holdings to the land fund in Vojvodina, which was then redistributed.61 In total, more than half a million people in Vojvodina (around onethird of the population) were impacted, leaving only four municipalities unaffected.62 Even though Hungary had occupied the Batschka during World War II and had executed thousands of Serbs and Jews in Novi Sad, reprisals against Hungarians were not as harsh. Since Hungary would become a friendly, communist neighbor, Hungarians in Vojvodina did not experience the same consequences that ethnic Germans did.63 The fate of the Danube Swabians was therefore not predetermined and could have been less severe, had that been politically advantageous. Regarding long-term stability in the region, categorically blaming all ethnic Germans while ignoring or minimizing the atrocities committed by other groups would have disastrous consequences for Yugoslavia. The myopia and whitewashing after World War II contributed to historical revisionism that became one of the driving forces leading to Yugoslavia’s disintegration. In Marko Attila Hoare’s assessment, “the politicization of the violence of the 1940s contributed to an atmosphere that made new atrocities possible in the 1990s.”64 Under Tito, historians who examined the crimes of the Ustasha and Chetniks tended to merely catalog the atrocities rather than interpret them. This failure to analyze the genocides “led directly to Serb and Croat nationalist revisionism.”65 After Tito’s death in 1980, the communist creation myth and historiography were being challenged, and during the 1990s this process accelerated. Previous historical production was abandoned and old historical writings were recovered—especially if these could serve nationalist purposes. Often the scholarship produced was uncritical, revisionist, and relativist, and arguably even more rigid than the publications under communism were.66 Those who were formerly labeled fascist collaborators by the communist regime, which includes the Ustasha and Chetniks, were rehabilitated, and the crimes they committed during World War II were

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minimized. The end of the war could now be recast not as victory and liberation but “through the politics of repression and victimization on the part of the communist regime.”67 Among those rehabilitated is Milan Nedić, the fanatically anti-Semitic leader of the collaboration government in Serbia, who embraced “a Nazi-style ideology that claimed that Serbs were members of the Aryan race.”68 With historical revisionism, Serbs could deny that there were fascists in their ranks, whereas Croats could minimize and relativize crimes committed in the NDH.69 In countries that were formerly republics of Yugoslavia, the “phenomenon of competitive collective victimhood” has been driving public discourse and national revisionist histories.70 Yet if one group tries to deny the culpability of its perpetrators, the people it originally targeted nonetheless remember what happened. While suppressed under Tito’s regime, the memories of internecine fighting during World War II were passed down from one generation to the next.71 Such dynamics can be the seeds from which future atrocities and war germinate. It has only been in the last two decades that scholarship challenging nationalist agendas has emerged, which has also made a more complex reassessment of the role of ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia possible.72 Without question, the writing of history in Eastern Europe after World War II was often driven by historical amnesia; however, a simplistic black-and-white narrative was also common among the Western Allies, where the expulsions of thirteen to fifteen million ethnic Germans have hardly ever been mentioned in history books. These transfers were hardly “orderly and humane,” as the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 had called for, and an estimated two million people did not survive them, succumbing to violence, starvation, or sickness.73 The work of R. M. Douglas, which represents a historiographical shift in the literature, shows that the Western Allies played a significant role in the expulsions, especially of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, a role “that went far beyond mere acquiescence.”74 Regarding the United States, there has been “a great deal of reluctance to try to integrate a messy, complex, morally compromised, and socially disruptive episode that remains to this day a political hot potato into the history of what most people still rightly consider a justified crusade—or, as Americans put it, a ‘Good War’—against one of the most monstrous regimes of modern times.”75 Undoubtedly, Germany’s leadership had to be held accountable for the atrocities it committed. However, it would be overly simplistic to celebrate the Allies as having liberated the world of the Nazis and to therefore assume that all of their actions were ethical. It is too convenient to hide under a cloak of self-righteousness without taking a serious look at what went wrong on all sides, including the culpability of the victo-

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rious powers. Indeed, it could be argued, as José Ayala Lasso, the first United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, did in a speech to expellees in 1995, that if the Allies at the end of World War II had “reflected more on the implications of the enforced flight and expulsion of the Germans, today’s demographic catastrophes, particularly those referred to as ‘ethnic cleansing’, would perhaps not have occurred to the same extent.”76

Human Rights and Collective Guilt It is not surprising, given the horrific acts committed by Nazi Germany, that the rest of the world had little sympathy for Germans who had been expelled from their homelands. A prevailing attitude has been that Germans got what they deserved, without considering that the brunt of these revenge acts were ultimately committed not against combatants but against civilian women and children. However, from a human rights perspective, the principle of universality clearly asserts that protections apply to all persons, not just those belonging or being assigned to certain groups that the international community—at any particular point in time—considers to be deserving. As Alfred de Zayas reminds us, when assessing these events, “the nationality of a victim must not matter; pain and suffering have no nationality. Nor does murder. Every crime is reprehensible, regardless of the nationality of its victim—or the victimizer.”77 While the Allies condemned mass deportations committed by Nazis as war crimes and crimes against humanity, those same powers sanctioned the expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans.78 Several lessons can be learned from this history, which could serve as a reminder that concepts such as collective guilt and massive reprisals against one group of people—without establishing individual guilt or innocence—are morally indefensible and in violation of international human rights norms, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948.79 The right to one’s homeland can be derived from numerous international treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the Genocide Convention; and the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious, and Linguistic Minorities. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and its Additional Protocol II of 1977 prohibit compulsory population transfers.80 While laws in general cannot be applied retroactively, Nazi perpetrators were certainly tried for crimes against humanity even though these

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were defined as such after the fact. However, many actions during the war, including the expulsions, violated already-existing international law. Efforts to “humanize” warfare had been underway throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in The Hague Convention of 1899, which codified military conduct in war.81 The Fourth Hague Convention of 1907 and its annexed articles clearly sought to limit the powers of belligerent occupiers and also prohibited the transfer of populations. While having no basis in international law, the conviction that Germans should be collectively blamed and punished for the war has caused additional problems, because other countries were able to create a national myth of being collectively innocent. Throughout eastern and southeastern Europe, German names of cities, streets, and graveyards have been eliminated, which makes it possible to pretend that Germans never lived there. It is also easier for Eastern European countries to claim that they have always been and should continue to be homogeneous—beliefs that strengthen nationalism and xenophobia, making it even more imperative to enact legal protections for minorities. It is necessary to understand the expulsions at the end of World War II if we are to envision a more peaceful world and a Europe more tolerant of ethnic diversity. The principle of collective guilt should never be applied to war because guilt has to be established individually. Yet, as de Zayas has noted, while guilt belongs to the individual, “morality binds us all.”82 We can move forward by understanding a nuanced and complicated history that looks at the culpability of all the involved parties, while at the same time refraining from blame and recriminations that further fuel ethnic animosity, hatred, and nationalism. Recognizing the inherent dignity of every person, including refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers, is an important first step. Protecting, upholding, and supporting human rights is essential. More than seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the wounds have not yet healed, although few of the people who experienced it firsthand are still alive. Coming to terms with the magnitude of Nazi atrocities can have a psychologically paralyzing effect, which is why it has been so difficult to come to terms with it. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich examined this phenomenon in their work The Inability to Mourn (1975), in which they describe why many Germans were only able to focus on their own suffering, without developing the capacity to mourn for other victims. Repression, denial, forgetting, and projection are all common defense mechanisms, and considerable energy is required to keep acceptable and unacceptable memories separated.83 Denying the suffering of others also helps protect individuals “against bitter reproaches

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of conscience.”84 According to the Mitscherlichs, prior to the 1970s such soul-searching did not occur in Germany. In this chapter I have argued that collective punishment for the acts committed by individuals is neither legally nor ethically defensible. The question of collective guilt, however, is more complicated. Karl Jaspers, a philosopher in Heidelberg who was driven from his post by the Nazis, reflected on this concept of guilt right after the war. According to Jaspers, criminal guilt is the most straightforward and those who committed crimes need to be held criminally accountable. However, he also examines political, moral, and metaphysical guilt, which deal with being responsible for having tolerated the regime, for having given it support and cooperation, and for “standing by inactively when the crimes were committed.”85 Jaspers concludes that all Germans were “guilty in some way” and all share in the political liability. The same is true today. Ultimately, all of us are responsible for the actions (or inactions) taken by our governments, regardless of whether or not we voted for the politicians. Acknowledging the culpability of our own governments can be important for developing greater empathy and strategies for navigating the present time, when hundreds of millions of people in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere have once again come under the sway of demagogues, who blame their country’s problems on immigrants and refugees and promote policies to homogenize their societies by driving out the “other.” In my mother’s case, her understanding of the suffering unleashed by the Nazi regime expanded tremendously when in her late sixties she visited Russia to find the grave of her father. Through a German-Russian friend who translated for her, she had conversations with women from the village where the mass grave was located, and hearing their stories made her literally nauseous and sick. While she had rightly considered herself to be a victim, she now saw the trauma of the war extended to people in other countries in a more concrete way, and, having gained that insight, she told me that “we Germans have to make amends.” In 2011 I took my mother back to Kischker and got to see the place where my ancestors had lived.86 With the help of Boris Delić, a local teacher, and Marijana Vuković, then a Cornell student, who grew up in Kischker, we were able to visit the various family homes and were graciously received. It was wonderful to be able to meet some of the Montenegrin families who were resettled between 1945 and 1946 and live there now. In the spirit of hospitality, we sat in several backyards, and were invited to Turkish coffee and a tasting of homemade Slivovitz (a spirit made of plums). If we can do that on an interpersonal level, then much is possible.

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Ute Ritz-Deutch received her PhD from Binghamton University in 2008, where she was mentored by Jean Quataert. At SUNY Cortland, State University of New York, and Tompkins Cortland Community College, she teaches courses on human rights, the criminal justice system, cultural anthropology, and prejudice and discrimination. Ute frequently lectures on human rights and also hosts a weekly talk radio show, the “Human Rights and Social Justice Program,” on WRFI community radio in Ithaca, New York. Her research interests are in human rights, immigrant rights, refugees, and asylum seekers. In 2019 she received the Amnesty International “Keeper of the Flame” award.

Notes I would like to foremost commemorate my mother, Johanna Falkenstein, neé Frank (1938–2020), and my great-grandparents, Elisabetha and Georg Simon, from whom I inherited a rich oral history. I also owe a great debt to Jean Quataert, my dissertation advisor at Binghamton University, who has influenced me immeasurably. 1. The borders of Vojvodina have changed multiple times. Located south of Hungary, west of Romania, and east of Croatia, it is half the size of Switzerland and has a population of around two million people. See Portmann, “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Peacetime?,” 448. Bačko Dobro Polje is around thirty-five kilometers north of Vojvodina’s capital, Novi Sad (Neusatz). Vojvodina is the most ethnically diverse region in Serbia. There are six officially recognized languages and more than twenty different ethnic groups. 2. For a history of the village, see the Heimatbuch by Johann Lorenz, Unvergessenes Kischker. Hundreds of Heimatbücher (Books of the Homeland) have been published, focusing on the history of a specific village and usually financed by the survivors. The purpose of these books is not to write a balanced or comprehensive history, but rather to give voice to those who lived there and to commemorate a home now lost. 3. De Zayas refers to fifteen million displaced. De Zayas, A Terrible Revenge, 1. Douglas estimates it was between twelve and fourteen million. 4. For my mother the tragedy of having lost her home was made even more painful because in Germany, locals, whom they referred to as Altbürger (meaning “old citizens” or Reichsdeutsche), treated them with contempt and called them “gypsies.” On the difficulties of integrating ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), see Kossert, Kalte Heimat. While the Danube Swabians generally referred to themselves as refugees (Flüchtlinge), their proper legal designation was expellees (Vertriebene). In West Germany the category of refugees was legally reserved for those Germans from East Prussia who had fled from the advancing Soviet Army. Wildenthal, Language of Human Rights, 55. 5. Retrieved 5 January 2023 from https://www.unrefugees.org/refugee-facts/ statistics/. 6. Immo Eberl, Die Donauschwaben: Deutsche Siedlung Südosteuropa, 142. Baden-Württemberg received large numbers of expellees and in the 1950s took

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

on official sponsorship (Patenschaft) of the Danube Swabians, which included supporting scholarships and museums. For more about ethnic relations and politics, see Bethke, Deutsche und Ungarische Minderheiten. Today, numerous organizations and institutions represent Danube Swabian culture and history, among them the Danube Swabian Cultural Foundation (Donauschwäbische Kulturstiftung) the Institute of Danube Swabian History and Regional Studies (Institut für donauschwäbische Geschichte und Landeskunde), and the House of the Danube Swabians (Haus der Donauschwaben). Many smaller communities throughout Germany also have memorials and Heimatkunde museums. In Karlsruhe Neureut, where many from Kischker settled, a Danube Swabian memorial commemorating the expulsion is prominent at the local cemetery. They are also known as Yugoslav Germans (Jugoslawien Deutsche). Germans numbered around five hundred thousand (out of fourteen million) and constituted the largest non-Slavic minority. Eberl, Die Donauschwaben, 19. Eberl, Die Donauschwaben, 176. The older generation, which grew up as citizens of Austria-Hungary, was less susceptible to Nazi influence. As Emily Greble points out, in Yugoslavia additional factions were involved in the civil war. In Sarajevo this included the Muslim Waffen-SS group Handžar (Handschar). Loyalties were complicated and shifting. See Greble, Sarajevo, 148–49. In other countries, formerly oppressed peoples sided with the Nazis to advance their own interests, for example Ukrainians, who previously felt discriminated against by Poles. Jews in those communities could be killed (or aided) by anyone. See Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide. Portmann, “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Peacetime?,” 455. Janjetović, “Die Konflikte,” 163. A Serbian (Partisan) neighbor tried to prevent their arrests until he was transferred. Her sister, whose husband was fighting in the Wehrmacht, was most vulnerable, whereas her father, whose new wife was Serbian, was relatively safe. See Savić, ed., Woman’s Identities in Vojvodina, 7–13. Portmann, “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Peacetime?,” 456. Eberl, Die Donauschwaben, 260–61. Janjetović, “Die Konflikte,” 163. Suppan, “Yugoslavism versus Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene Nationalism,” 85. Portmann, “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Peacetime?,” 458. This is the argument put forward by the Documentation Project Committee, Genocide of the Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia [hereafter Genocide], 186–91. The authors claim that genocide was committed against Danube Swabians, that those responsible should be criminally prosecuted, and that Germans should receive restitution and compensation from successor nations for their loss of property. Genocide, 52–54. On the difficulties of defining “genocide,” see Hoare, “Genocide,” 1193–1214. Janjetović, “Die Konflikte,” 157. Bergen, “Tenuousness and Tenacity,” 279. Bergen, “Tenuousness and Tenacity,” 279.

126 • Ute Ritz-Deutch 27. Wildenthal, Language of Human Rights, 61. Douglas points out that lead editor Theodor Schieder was politically compromised because of the role he had played in the ethnic cleansing of Poles during the Nazi occupation. Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 349. 28. Weber, ed., Leidensweg der Deutschen, 3. As the title implies, it was written through an anti-communist lens and contains invective rhetoric, especially regarding the communist Partisans. In over four thousand pages, more than forty thousand casualties are listed by name, and eyewitness reports from every affected community in Yugoslavia are included. 29. Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 6. 30. Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 349. 31. Wildenthal, Language of Human Rights, 61. 32. Wildenthal, Language of Human Rights, 124. 33. Sudeten Germans are the largest refugee group in Bavaria and have had considerable political clout. Langenbacher, “The Mastered Past?,” 49. 34. Niven, “Implicit Equations,” 111. 35. Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust, xi. 36. Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust, xiv–xvi. 37. Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 361. 38. Retrieved 16 May 2022 from https://www.z-g-v.de/. 39. Niven, “Implicit Equations,” 113–14. 40. Retrieved 16 May 2022 from https://www.ausstellung-erzwungenewege.de/ die-deutschen-am-ende-des-2-weltkriegs. 41. Retrieved 16 May 2022 from https://www.ausstellung-erzwungenewege.de/ die-deutschen-am-ende-des-2-weltkriegs. 42. Mezger, Forging Germans, 89–92. The Landdienst was established in 1934 but later became obligatory. It sent hundreds of thousands of young Germans to farms across Europe. During the early 1940s through the Kinderlandverschickung alone, around eight thousand German children were sent to the Batschka and the Schwäbische Turkei (94). 43. Mezger, Forging Germans, 95. 44. Despite these developments, resistance to Nazi influence remained. For example, until 1944 Adam Berenz of the Katholische Aktion (Catholic Action) frequently published anti-Nazi articles in the weekly newspaper Die Donau (The Danube). 45. Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries, 224–25. 46. Zakić, “The Waffen-SS Division,” 217. 47. Bergen, “Tenuousness and Tenacity,” 274. 48. Janko, “Aufruf des Volksgruppenführers,” Verordnungsblatt der Volksgruppenführung, 1 March 1942, p. 1. On the same page, Janko, “Ergänzungsbestimmung zum Aufruf zwecks Wehrdienstleistung.” Cited in Zakić, “The Waffen-SS Division,” 222. 49. Zakić, “The Waffen-SS Division,” 209. Ultimately one-third of over nine hundred thousand Waffen-SS recruits were ethnic Germans from all over Europe. A legal formality prevented the Wehrmacht from recruitment of noncitizens, which is why so many ended up drafted into the Waffen-SS. 50. Retrieved 16 May 2022 from https://web.archive.org/web/20080906111156/ http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-20/tgmwc-20-196-02

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51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

.shtml. In the Nuremberg Trials document NT-Vol. XXIV, there are 142 entries on Yugoslavia. Browning, “The Wehrmacht in Serbia Revisited,” 36. Schiessl, “The Volksdeutsche of Eastern Europe,” 195–212. Zakić, “The Waffen-SS Division,” 239. Zakić, “The Waffen-SS Division,” 239. “Foreword,” in Pirjevec and Greble, Tito and His Comrades, viii. “Foreword,” in Pirjevec and Greble, Tito and His Comrades, viii. Janjetović, “The Role of the Danube Swabians,” 209–10. Portmann, “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Peacetime?,” 447. Dragojević, “Contesting Ethnicity,” 297–98. The drastic decrease is partly due to fewer people openly identifying as Germans after the war, claiming the ethnicity of their non-German spouses instead. By contrast, the percentage of Serbs in Vojvodina has increased from 32 percent in 1931 to 65 percent in 2002. Dragojević, “Contesting Ethnicity,” 312. This is part of a wider effort to make Serbia’s “most European” region less multicultural. Portmann, “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Peacetime?,” 447. Portmann, “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Peacetime?,” 458. Portmann, “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Peacetime?,” 456. Bjeljac and Lukič, “Migrations,” 84. Portmann, “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Peacetime?,” 453. Hoare, “Genocide,” 1205. Hoare, “Genocide,” 1204. Nielsen, “Serbian Historiography after 1991,” 96. Nielsen, “Serbian Historiography after 1991,” 93. A similar trend happened across Eastern Europe, where the history after World War II “was spun as a fight about fascists and fighting fascism.” However, Romania’s decision to join and later abandon the Nazis had more to do with its territorial claims regarding Transylvania. After the fall of Communism in 1989, some Eastern Europeans claimed that their leadership during the 1930s and 1940s was not fascist but rather far-seeing anti-Bolshevik. Case, Between States, 94–95. Hoare, “Genocide,” 1204. The president of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, was the best-known Croat revisionist historian. Hoare, “Genocide,” 1204. Nielson, “Serbian Historiography after 1991,” 97. Suppan, “Yugoslavism,” 88. On historiographical shifts since the 1990s, see for example, Naimark and Case, Yugoslavia and its Historians (2003), and Nielson, “Serbian Historiography” (2020). See also, Portman, “Ethnic Cleansing” (2016); Hoare, “Genocide” (2010); and Greble, Sarajevo (2011). On the reassessment of Germans in Serbia, see Janjetović, “The Role of the Danube Swabians” (2014). Article XII of the Potsdam Agreement covered the expulsion of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Retrieved 4 January 2023 from https:// www.nato.int/ebookshop/video/declassified/doc_files/potsdam%20agreem ent.pdf. Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 4–5. Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 3.

128 • Ute Ritz-Deutch 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Quoted in de Zayas, “The Right to One’s Homeland,” 291–92. De Zayas, “The Right to One’s Homeland,” 285. De Zayas, A Terrible Revenge, 37. Of the thirty articles in the UDHR, the following are relevant regarding the discrimination of Germans and their expulsion from Yugoslavia: 1–5, 7–10, 13, 15–20. Retrieved 16 May 2022 from https://www.un.org/en/universal-dec laration-human-rights/. De Zayas, A Terrible Revenge, 258–59. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 32. Quataert shows how human rights language was popularized during World War II when the Allies proclaimed in 1942 that victory against the enemies was essential to preserve human rights and justice. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 41. De Zayas, “The Right to One’s Homeland,” 4. Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn, 16. Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn, 16. Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, 43. Since then, a memorial for the original ancestors has been erected in Bačko Dobro Polje. Other memorials across Vojvodina have been financed by Danube Swabians, including those at former concentration camps like Jarek. Retrieved 16 May 2022 from http://www.kischker.de.

Bibliography Bartov, Omer. Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018. ———. Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Bjeljac, Željko, and Vesna Lukič. “Migrations on the Territory of Vojvodina between 1919 and 1948.” East European Quarterly XLII, no. 1 (March 2008): 69–93. Bergen, Doris L. “Tenuousness and Tenacity: The Volksdeutschen of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust.” In Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness, edited by Krista O’Donnell et al., 267–86. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Bethke, Carl. Deutsche und Ungarische Minderheiten in Kroatien und der Vojvodina 1918-1941: Identitätsentwürfe und Ethnopolitische Mobilisierung. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009. Browning, Christopher. “The Wehrmacht in Serbia Revisited.” In Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, edited by Omer Bartov et al., 31–40. New York: The New Press, 2002. Case, Holly. Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. de Zayas, Alfred M. “The Right to One’s Homeland, Ethnic Cleansing, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.” Criminal Law Forum 6 (1995): 257–314. ———. A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Victimhood and the Politics of Memory • 129 Documentation Project Committee. Genocide of the Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia 1944-1948. Munich, 2003. Douglas, R. M. Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Dragojević, Mila. “Contesting Ethnicity: Emerging Regional Identity in Vojvodina.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 8, no. 2 (2008): 290–316. Eberl, Immo. Die Donauschwaben: Deutsche Siedlung in Südosteuropa. Ausstellungskatalog. Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1987. Greble, Emily. Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Hoare, Marko Attila. “Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia Before and After Communism.” Europe-Asia Studies 62, no. 7 (2010): 1193–1214. Janjetović, Zoran. “Die neueste Serbische Historiographie über die Donauschwaben.” Donauschwaben Issues Article (2008). http://www.donauschwaben-usa .org/archive_2008_neueste_serbische_historiographie_donauschwaben.htm. ———. “Die Konflikte zwischen Serben und Donauschwaben.” Südost-Forschungen 58 (1999): 119–68. ———. “The Role of the Danube Swabians in the History of the Serbs: A Heterodox View.” Tokovi Istorije 22, no. 3 (2014): 197–212. Jaspers, Karl. The Question of German Guilt. Vol. 16. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. Kossert, Andreas. Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945. Munich: Siedler Verlag, Random House Pantheon Edition, 2009. Langenbacher, Eric. “The Mastered Past? Collective Memory Trends in Germany Since Unification.” German Politics & Society, 28, no. 1 (2010): 42–68. Lorenz, Johann. Unvergessenes Kischker: 1786-1944. Karlsruhe: Selbstverlag des Heimatausschusses, 1980. Lumans, Valdis O. Himmler’s Auxiliaries, The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German National Minorities of Europe, 1933–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Mezger, Caroline. Forging Germans: Youth, Nation, and the National Socialist Mobilization of Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, 1918-1944. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Mitscherlich, Alexander, and Margarete Mitscherlich. The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior. New York: Random House/Grove Press, 1975. Naimark, Norman, and Holly Case. Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Nielsen, Christian Axboe. “Serbian Historiography after 1991.” Contemporary European History 29 (2020): 90–103. Niven, Bill. “Implicit Equations in Constructions of German Suffering.” German Monitor 67, no. 1 (2007): 105–23. Portmann, Michael. “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Peacetime? Yugoslav/Serb Colonization Projects in Vojvodina in the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Genocide Research 18, no. 4 (2016): 447–62. Quataert, Jean H. Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilization in Global Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

130 • Ute Ritz-Deutch Pirjevec, Jože, and Emily Greble. Tito and His Comrades. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. Savić, Svenka, ed. Woman’s Identities in Vojvodina: 1920-1930. Novi Sad, Serbia: Futura Publikacije, 2006. Schiessl, Christoph. “The Volksdeutsche of Eastern Europe as Nazi Collaborators during World War II.” In German-Occupied Europe in the Second World War, edited by Raphael Scheck et al., 195–212. London: Routledge, 2019. Suppan, Arnold. “Yugoslavism versus Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene Nationalism.” In Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, edited by Norman Naimark and Holly Case, 116–40. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Weber, Karl, ed. Leidensweg der Deutschen im Kommunistischen Jugoslawien IV: Menschenverluste—Namen und Zahlen in der Zeit von 1944-1948. Munich: Donauschwäbische Kulturstiftung, 1994. Wildenthal, Lora. The Language of Human Rights in West Germany. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Zakić, Mirna. “The Waffen-SS Division ‘Prinz Eugen’ and the Anti-Partisan Warfare in Yugsolavia 1942-1944.” In Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in Yugoslavia in World War II, edited by Mirna Zakić, 209–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

CHAPTER 6

E E E Coming to Grips with American Racism Anne Moody’s Human Rights Advocacy in Germany during the Late Cold War Leigh Ann Wheeler

Jean Quataert and I coedited the Journal of Women’s History between 2010 and 2015. This relationship required intense intellectual collaboration, especially when we wrote the editorial notes that introduced each quarterly issue. My specialty is modern U.S. history, but Jean had me thinking constantly about transnational and human rights history. Still, when I began researching the biography of Anne Moody in 2018, neither I nor anyone else, for that matter, knew that these themes played an important role in Moody’s life. Without Jean’s influence, might I have missed them as well? Probably not, actually, but I would not have appreciated the significance of my findings as fully as I have without the years of preparation Jean provided me. In spring 2021, just weeks before her untimely death, Jean attended a talk I gave on Zoom that grew into this chapter. Her extravagant enthusiasm for it reassured me that it belongs in this volume and still encourages me when I feel weighed down by the heaviness of this work and her absence. Thank you, Jean. Anne Moody cemented her legacy as a major figure in the U.S. civil rights movement in 1968 when she published her bestselling memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi (Bantam Dell, 1968). Soon after, she left the movement and the United States. Northern racism, Black nationalism, and FBI surveillance eroded her hopes for equality, racial integration, and her own personal safety. Like so many disillusioned Black Americans before her, in 1969 Moody fled to France, hoping to find, if not opportunity, at least respite. Her years in Europe provided her with a global stage to speak about civil rights; as a U.S. citizen, her voice validated, in its very existence, even as it denied, in its specific substance, her nation’s claims to lead the “free world.” By taking her stories of American racism to an

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international audience and recasting civil rights in terms of human rights, Moody developed a new identity and a new activist role. She was not simply a disgruntled expatriate but a global citizen who invited the world to scrutinize her home country. In this capacity, she also exhorted her host countries to consider their own culpability in violations of human and civil rights, particularly as proponents of nationalism, specifically through sport. This chapter contributes to transnational scholarship that examines the global dimensions of youth activism for civil rights and against imperialism in the 1960s and 1970s as well as work that traces relationships between the U.S. Black Freedom movement and global movements for human rights.1 It provides a fine-grained analysis of how one particular Atlantic crossing influenced its hosts and its subject by showing how Moody’s extended sojourn in Europe between 1969 and 1974 called international attention to American racism even as it led Moody to embrace human rights more broadly. By focusing on a U.S. civil rights activist who is remembered—by historians and also fans of her memoir—only for her life before 1964, and not at all for the work she did later in Europe, the chapter also raises questions about whose stories survive and why. Moody moved from Mississippi to New York City in 1964; five years later, she moved to France and then Germany. She was twenty-nine years old and accompanied by her husband, whom she had married just a year and a half earlier—Austin Straus, a White Jewish man from Brooklyn.2 Moody remembered how moving to New York had helped her “deal with Mississippi,” calming the reflex to “react radically to the chaos around me” and replacing it with a “desire to understand what it was I left.” From “this distance in time and space,” Moody was able to rediscover her “little voice,” the one “inside each of us that speaks to us and us alone.” In a new time and place, “events that at one time seemed . . . of earthshaking importance took their place in history and sat in the cool of memory awaiting analysis.” By August 1969 Moody again sought a “larger matrix of experience” that would make “everything at once seem smaller and less urgent.” She hoped that living in the South of France would help her see “the old environment in new ways” and “come to grips with America,” as living in New York had helped her do with Mississippi.3 It would certainly give her a break from some of the contradictory burdens of American racism—fear of the racist rage of Whites as well as the counter-rage of Blacks, disillusionment with White liberals and skepticism of Black Power, exhaustion from White media demands and hurt from being ignored by the Black press.4 Moreover, other American writers had sought inspiration in Europe; it seemed the right move for a rising literary star. So, in 1969, Moody joined a long lineage of Black artists and writers

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who made their way to Europe—among them Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. But she came later, in the wave of postwar civil rights activists who expatriated across the Atlantic in the 1960s.5 Celebrity awaited Moody in Europe. Before she had even left the United States, the prestigious publisher S. Fischer Verlag had begun to negotiate with Dial Press to issue a German edition of Coming of Age in Mississippi. The book had deeply moved acquisitions editor, Peter Härtling, who hoped to convince the acclaimed and politically progressive literary duo Annemarie and Heinrich Böll to help him with the project. “I’m sorry for ambushing you like this,” Peter Härtling wrote to Heinrich Böll in February 1969. But “I’m writing about a book, a book that has stirred me up, that I’m carrying around, that has become, in its grief and its anger, in its honesty and in its abandonment, a portent.” Heinrich Böll replied quickly: “I was moved as much as you were” by Coming of Age in Mississippi; moreover, Annemarie would be happy to translate the book into German, and he would write the foreword. Unsurprised but still delighted, Härtling responded, “I even expected you to say yes . . . thinking that the book would have to engage you, make you uneasy, as it does me.”6 In the coming months, Annemarie Böll corresponded with Moody about terms, idioms, and vernacular speech. She struggled especially with the title, because “coming of age” did not translate easily into German. Härtling suggested Raus aus Mississippi (Out of Mississippi). But Annemarie found a perfect, more poetic, and evocative solution—Erwachen in Mississipppi—because, as she explained, erwachen, or “awakening,” “also means becoming conscious.”7 Heinrich Böll’s foreword for the book, “Farewell to Uncle Tom,” framed Erwachen in Mississippi as the story of a girl who resisted not only racism but also the “Uncle Tom” strategies that generations of Black Mississippians had long used to survive slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow. “Uncle Tom” survival strategies included the ecstatic spirituality that brought joy, released pent-up passions, and promised a rich and eternal afterlife; the acceptance of inferior everything, including schools, houses, jobs, medical care, and public services; and the head-down, shuffling tolerance of abuse and violence that many southern Black men had perfected. Böll’s foreword did not just honor Moody’s demonstrations against injustice—including her participation in the most violent lunch counter sit-in in 1963; it also recognized the punishment borne by her body and her psyche, acknowledged the despair Moody expressed at the end of her memoir in 1964, and lamented that progress had stalled. “If such sacrifice is required to speak out for a democratic minimum, the right to vote, and with such scant

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success,” Böll wrote, “What then will it cost not only to speak out for, but to achieve, full constitutional rights, total equality before the law?” As if instructed to close on an optimistic note, Böll gestured hopefully toward the international dimensions of this “farewell to Uncle Tom.” Democratic youth movements were emerging around the world “in churches, in schools, in universities and in work places.” Indeed, Böll pointed out, even “young people in Socialist countries” were, like Moody and other civil rights activists, refusing to “allow . . . themselves to be put off with a ‘future’ that is merely a falsified heaven.”8 S. Fischer Verlag called Erwachen in Mississippi its “most important book for the spring” and planned a major launch in Frankfurt during the second week of March 1970. It would include Moody, the Bölls, and various celebrities, as well as press conferences and radio and television interviews (see figure 6.1). Verlag editor Wolfgang Mertz proudly conveyed these plans to Moody, thinking she would be pleased. He had even alerted editors at the glossy weekly Der Stern of Erwachen’s upcoming release and shared with them Moody’s address in Nice, France. He advised Moody not to be surprised “if some reporters should turn up all of a sudden.”9 Moody responded testily, a reflection of her fatigue and disillusionment with White liberals as well as her experiences with surprise visitors. I will “let you know exactly when I can come to Frankfurt,” she wrote. “If I come in March it will be a week later as I am not at my best at the time of the month you indicated.” Moreover, she wrote, “I tire very easily, so I do not plan interviews and shows crammed together one on top of the other.” Moody also regretted how American television and radio interviewers had tried to sensationalize her story, and she warned Mertz, “I am not coming to Germany for more of the same.” She had no patience for interviews driven by condescending and patronizing stereotypes rather than a thoughtful consideration of her complicated text, so she insisted that each interviewer read her book from cover to cover and allow for at least thirty minutes of “in-depth and intelligent” conversation. Finally, Moody demanded that the press stop sharing her address without her permission. “It was presumptuous of you to give it to Stern [sic] and tell them that they can burst in on me any time they get ready,” she wrote. “That is not the way I do things.”10 Moody had been frank with editors at S. Fischer Verlag, but she had not told them everything. Most importantly, she did not tell them that she had left the United States largely to escape the pressure and exposure that came with celebrity. Hearing that reporters for a popular German magazine might appear on her doorstep at any moment brought that pressure roaring back. Furthermore, life in Mississippi had taught Moody to fear

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Figure 6.1. • German edition, Erwachen in Mississippi, S. Fischer Verlag, 1970.

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the unexpected. Every cell of her body remembered the White men who showed up, uninvited and angry, to drag her away from the Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson, to throw bricks at her family’s home in Centreville, Mississippi, or to try to kill her at the Freedom House in Canton. For Moody, surprise visits were potentially deadly visits.11 The prospect of visiting Germany also terrified Moody. The Bölls had been wonderful and had even invited her to their home in Cologne. But she associated Germany with Hitler, Nazis, racism, and genocidal antisemitism. That she was Black and her husband Jewish made this history of the German Holocaust all the more frightening. Moody also dreaded reentering the media pressure-cooker that had driven her out of the United States just six months earlier.12 At the same time, she appreciated the efforts of the Bölls and S. Fischer Verlag to make her book a success in West Germany, and she finally agreed to attend the book launch. A closing question captured her internal conflict between craving attention for her work and wanting to hide from the world: Why, she wondered in a letter to Mertz, had Der Stern not contacted her? “Did they cool off for some reason that I don’t know about?”13 On the short flight from Nice to Frankfurt, Moody “was a nervous wreck.” Her “knees were shaking” when the plane landed on Monday, 16 March 1970. As she made her way down the stairs to the tarmac alongside her husband, bright flashbulbs exploded around them while television crews trained their cameras on her. Someone shouted, “There she is!” and Moody wondered what movie star might have been on her flight. When S. Fischer Verlag’s Peter Härtling filled her arms with a huge bouquet of flowers, she realized that this red-carpet reception was, in fact, for her.14 The next day, Moody met Annemarie and Heinrich Böll at the S. Fischer Verlag office for a press conference with major German newspapers. Annemarie described Moody as “a tall, graceful Negress with long elegant limbs and a round face, which at first glance looks only sweet and childlike, but at the same time very sensitive, very vulnerable and very exhausted.” Sitting between the Bölls, dressed in a Black sweater and colorful, embroidered vest, Moody charmed reporters. They remarked on her self-confidence, the “lively play of her hands,” and her authenticity. She explained the suffering inflicted on her by Whites without demonizing them; she gave credit to Whites who had helped her. She described the lives of “colored people in the countryside and in the ghettos of the big cities” without idealizing them; yet she also placed the blame for Black “resignation,” “self-abasement,” and “self-destruction” squarely on centuries of oppression under White domination. One reporter marveled at Moody’s candor, spontaneity, refusal to “rely on any dogma,” and frank-

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ness, whether speaking about “the smoldering sexual relations between Black and White” or the failures of civil rights activism. Another asked about the final, despairing sentences in her book, written in English as “I wonder. I really wonder,” but translated into German as, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Moody answered simply, “I know it less than ever.” Neither an “‘Uncle-Tom’ type” nor “a militant Black Panther,” Moody aimed to do what Black radicals—among them, Mary Church Terrell, W. E. B. DuBois, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King Jr.—had done before her. Some would say she betrayed her U.S. citizenship by airing the nation’s dirty laundry on race, but others would argue that she and her forebearers were actually defending their U.S. citizenship and laying claim to a form of global citizenship. In Anne’s simple words, “I had to tell the world what was happening here with us.” Back home, Black militants might be arming themselves for self-defense, but for Anne, “my book is my rifle.”15 Moody’s first six months of life in Europe, with her husband and two cats, had been a time of quiet anonymity in the healing climate of the French Riviera. But the publication of Erwachen in Mississippi changed all of that, making Moody, once again, a celebrity and introducing her to new friends and sources of support. In Frankfurt, Germany, she was interviewed by newspaper, radio, and television journalists, including the American Forces Network with popular host Herb Glover.16 Meanwhile, the major West German newspapers published enthusiastic reviews of Erwachen in Mississippi. Moody’s media appearances and enthusiastic reviewers—like the one who wrote in Hamburger Abendblatt, this book “should have as many readers as possible”—helped make Moody’s book a bestseller in West Germany. The time was also right. West German interest in Black America had never been greater. Six years earlier, in 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. had visited East and West Germany; his assassination in 1968 left citizens of both countries horrified. When race-based violence broke out on U.S. military bases around West Germany in the following months, many locals resented that American occupation forces had brought American racial problems along with them. Some Germans appreciated the opportunity to step out from the shadow of their nation’s Nazi past by vigorously denouncing American racism. In 1969 West German students in Frankfurt created the Black Panther Solidarity Committee to support the growing militancy of the Black Freedom movement in the United States and to build political alliances with African American GIs against the U.S. war in Vietnam.17 Perhaps this recent surge in student activism for Black rights and against the U.S. war in Vietnam increased Moody’s sense of comfort

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in Germany, for she and Austin decided to stay. At first they lived with the Bölls, who “became great friends.” But when Heinrich realized that the couple needed long-term lodging, he searched until he found a seldom-used vacation cottage in Geiselbach, a tiny village just an hour’s drive from Frankfurt. It was owned by Gerda and Helmut Scheffel, translators for S. Fischer Verlag, who allowed Moody and her husband to live there rent-free.18 The two-room cottage was known by locals as the “Hüehner Babe” or “chicken daddy’s house.” No one really knew why. The cottage was located in the Spessart Mountains, between Bavaria and Hessen, on the edge of the Black Forest. The Scheffels’ son, Michael, recalled that Moody “seemed to like very much the countryside, the cottage, and all the environment.” Indeed, Geiselbach reminded Moody of her hometown, Centreville, Mississippi, where “the people had the same simple passions,” and she could wander into town and see friends and acquaintances everywhere. Alternatively, she “could walk for miles and miles every day in the woods and never see a soul.” It was here that Moody realized how much she “really loved Mississippi.” Geiselbach “was my Mississippi,” Moody declared. “And I could have it in a foreign country,” without “all the racial shit and stuff, but the woods, you know, the quiet, the plain simple people.”19 As the two settled into their quiet rural life in Geiselbach, Moody continued to travel back and forth to Frankfurt for interviews. In July 1970 Erwachen in Mississippi hit the top-ten bestseller list in Der Spiegel, and the next month Moody met with Maria Frisé, a reporter for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, at a local café. Frisé described Moody “sitting quite delicately and thin on an uncomfortable chair . . . in a violet blouse with long Black pants, a short-peaked cap on her frizzy hair.” Moody must have hated that description. She detested “nappy hair,” and after visiting a beauty parlor in Frankfurt where stylists did not know how to treat Black hair, she had come away with hair that was fried rather than smoothed and curled. Mortified, Moody wore a cap while it grew out.20 Moody told Frisé a short version of her story. It began with the “Negro hut,” the poverty, her mother’s constant pregnancies and babies, hunger, fear, and always her frustration with “Uncle Tom, who goes to church on Sundays and hopes for a better life in heaven . . . not on earth.” Moody fought her way out and went to college. “From now on,” Frisé wrote, “her biography is also the history of the Civil Rights Movement, of the hope for a decisive turn and of the great disappointment that followed.” After nearly collapsing under the pressure, the threats, and the violence, Moody escaped to the North and worked to raise money for Mississippi Freedom Summer. But as a fundraiser she began to feel

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less like an activist making change than like an “actress on stage.” She performed, then “the audience claps its hands, goes home, and nothing changes.” Moody wanted desperately to do more to improve the lives of Black Mississippians. As she talked, Frisé studied her face, noting the suffering and sadness etched there. But as the two sat together, they received word that another Black civil rights leader in the United States had been assassinated: Leon Jordan, a fourth-term candidate for Missouri’s House of Representatives, had been “shot dead in the street.” How, Frisé asked, “can you overcome this fear [of being murdered] when you’re an American with dark skin?” Moody thought for a moment before responding, “We must insist on our rights; we must fight.” But Frisé wondered what kind of fighting Moody might mean and what kind her readers might advocate: “Black Power, or the non-violent way that is being carried on by Martin Luther King’s successors?”21 Just days before this interview, Black Power and armed militant protests had made news in the United States and Germany. On 18 August 1970 Black Panther and Communist Party member Angela Davis—a recent graduate student from the University of Frankfurt in West Germany and Humboldt University in East Berlin—appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. She had gone underground to avoid arrest after being implicated in a kidnapping and murder accomplished using guns she had purchased.22 The lives of Davis and Moody ran along parallel paths at times, divergent ones at others, but in the early 1970s their experiences intersected briefly. Black women born in the U.S. South in the 1940s within four years of each other, Davis and Moody graduated from college, joined the Black Freedom movement, and found their way to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. But whereas Moody grew up in rural Mississippi poverty and was the daughter of uneducated parents who survived White racism by adopting “Uncle Tom” strategies, Davis was born into a solidly middle-class and upwardly mobile family in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father owned a service station, while her mother taught school, joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and took Davis with her to pursue an MA at New York University. In the 1960s Davis studied philosophy with Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, pursued graduate work at the University of Frankfurt, earned a PhD in philosophy at Humboldt University in East Berlin, and joined the Communist Party. Meanwhile, Moody attended Natchez College, then earned her BA from Tougaloo College in Mississippi while protesting, canvassing, and suffering arrest and imprisonment for civil rights. By 1970 Moody had published her bestselling and now-classic memoir, married a White Jewish graduate student from Brooklyn, continued to

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decry violence, and moved to Germany. In contrast, by 1970 Davis had accepted a faculty position at the University of California, Los Angeles, joined the local Black Panther Party, and remained single; she purchased guns for her own bodyguards, but they were used by others to try to free several prisoners, including her incarcerated love-interest George Jackson. In 1970 Moody’s future looked bright, while Davis seemed headed toward prison and maybe worse. But both women enjoyed tremendous support in Germany. Even as Moody’s book became a bestseller there, an international movement to “free Angela Davis” mobilized.23 It was in this global context that Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö published a Finnish language version of Coming of Age in Mississippi. Titled simply Musta tyttö (Black girl), the Finnish press chose cover art that reflected the days’ headlines rather than the book and its author (see figure 6.2). Musta tyttö featured the stylized face of a Black woman with an Afro so large it took up most of the book’s front dust jacket and extended beyond its edges. Moody never wore her hair in an Afro; the image was classic Angela Davis, not Anne Moody.24 We do not know how Moody felt about the Finnish title or its cover art, but she must have noticed that it did not look anything like her. When Musta tyttö came out, Moody and her husband were enjoying their Geiselbach hideaway where Moody’s fame as a celebrated author went unrecognized, though she always stood out as the only Black person in town.25 She spent her days writing, hiking through the dense forest, enjoying the “fantastic walking paths with beautiful lakes,” making new friends, and making love with her husband. Daily chores were not easy in their primitive cabin, but Moody had lots of experience making do under such conditions. Her efforts were eased by the generosity of a neighbor who let Moody use her washing machine to do laundry. One of Moody’s favorite activities was to visit with locals at Dedio’s, a pub owned by an old Geiselbach family. There she played slot machines, ate blueberry pie, and met new people, among them Cathy Niederhaus.26 After graduating from high school in Canada, Niederhaus’s parents sent her to the family’s ancestral home in Geiselbach to spend the summer with grandparents and reconnect with her German roots. One day, Niederhaus entered Dedio’s, where she saw a “lady . . . holding court” and speaking English with a group that included Heinrich Böll. “Sit down, girl, have a little chat with us,” Moody beckoned Niederhaus. The two became fast friends; they walked, talked, fished, hung out at Dedio’s, and laid the foundation for a friendship that would span most of Moody’s life. Later, Niederhaus and Moody visited a nearby town, Gelnhausen, home to a large American military base. While the two lunched at a local restaurant, a group of Black American soldiers hassled Moody for keeping

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Figure 6.2. • Finnish edition of Coming of Age in Mississippi. Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö (Helsinki, 1971).

company with a White girl. “Hey, you some kind of Oreo cookie,” one said, “Black on the outside and White on the inside? What are you doing with that honkie?” Perhaps these men represented the swelling ranks of Black GI militants who saluted with raised fists, sported Afros, identified with the Black Power movement, and suffered for it in a White-dominated and racist military. But Moody did not care. To her, their behavior

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was as racist as that of Whites in her Mississippi hometown, and she “tore into them.” Later, she simply said, “there’s ugly people on both sides.”27 Racial tensions among Americans created political opportunities for Germans, East and West. West German students worked to build alliances with disgruntled Black soldiers, hoping to persuade them to turn against the U.S. war in Vietnam and even to desert the army. East German officials treated American racial tensions as evidence of “‘the whole lie and hollowness’ of American democracy.” Unsurprisingly, then, editors at East Germany’s premier publisher Verlag Neues Leben (VNL—“New Life Publishers”) eagerly negotiated with S. Fischer Verlag and Dial Press to issue its own edition of Erwachen in Mississippi. The East German press planned to use Moody’s memoir to contrast American claims of affluence, democracy, and equality with American realities of poverty, discrimination, and inequality. VNL editors accepted Annemarie Böll’s translation without changes, but they demanded that Heinrich Böll remove the “controversial passage” that praises “young people in Socialist countries” for “no longer allowing themselves to be put off with a ‘future’ that is merely a fake heaven.” He agreed. VNL publicity materials proceeded to describe Erwachen in Mississippi as an exposé on the absurdity of “the legend of rich America with its unlimited possibilities.” The press commissioned a review from Dr. Horst Ihde, a well-known expert in African American literature at East Berlin’s Humboldt University. Ihde’s review praised Moody as representing “a new generation of colored fighters” who embrace the values of the Communist Party. The East German newspaper Neue Zeit used Moody’s story about working as a strikebreaker in a chicken-processing factory to bolster government claims that monopoly capitalists used Jim Crow to divide and weaken the working class. Calling Moody “a spiritual sister of civil rights campaigner Angela Davis,” Neue Zeit explained that “both fight for the realization of America’s Declaration of Independence” and its claim that “all men are born equal and free.”28 Moody had hoped to feel more equal and free in Europe than she had felt in the United States, and in many ways she did. Still, she and Austin wanted American birthright (jus soli) citizenship for their child, and in 1971 they returned to New York for the birth of their son, Sasha Straus. Six months later they headed back across the pond, crowded out by American racism. This time, Moody came to Germany as an official guest of the German Academic Exchange Service, or DAAD, a position arranged for her by Heinrich Böll (see figure 6.3). The DAAD provided Moody with a generous stipend and a fourteen-room house in Berlin. Here, Moody spread her manuscripts out on a large table and wrote, sometimes in longhand, sometimes on a typewriter.29

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Figure 6.3. • Anne Moody, Austin Straus, and Sasha Straus, 1972. Photo and copyright permission by photographer C. Werner Bethsold. Blickwechsel: 25 Jahre Berliner Künstlerprogramm (Berliner Künsterlerprogramm des DAAD, 1988), 116; C. Bethsold email to author, 17 January 2018.

In Berlin, Moody and Austin felt as if they were being watched, an experience with which Moody was all too familiar and one she had hoped to escape in Europe. The surveillance seemed to begin after Moody criticized President Richard Nixon on a radio show and “blasted America for the Vietnam War, [and] racism.” First, she and Austin discovered that their mail was being opened. Sometimes they felt as if they were being followed. Austin wrote later of being Shadowed by shadows stared at by strangers. Silence on the phone definitely not God’s. CIA? FBI? IRS?30

Moody discovered that people she thought were friends were actually informants, paid to observe and discredit her. “A whole slew of AGENTS entered my life,” she recalled.

144 • Leigh Ann Wheeler They started poking around in my private life—testing ways to go about it. The only weakness they found was with my marriage. . . My husband had problems that could be used against me. . . I knew of these problems but they made me aware of them in a manner I did not know. . . They tried to embarrass me with it. . . But I would not let them. . . [ellipses in the original]

Moody received phone calls from strangers who told her that Austin was having affairs with other women and men too. Explosive and sometimes violent fights broke out between Moody and Austin. Austin would later write about them in his poems, recalling: fights with you in streets/rooms/on subway platforms public places/my scalp split open in Holland/knife wounds in Berlin terrible brawls in The Bronx31

As Moody and Austin struggled to maintain their sanity and their marriage, they stayed in touch with Heinrich Böll. He had recently become president of PEN International (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) and invited Moody to participate in a PEN conference on “Sport and Nationalism” that was scheduled to coincide with the 1972 Munich Olympics. Presenters and participants included nearly fifty writers from all over the world; they offered Moody a precious opportunity to speak to an international audience on a platform likely to attract global attention.32 As participants made their way to Cologne for the conference, set to begin on 9 September 1972, a horrific international tragedy began to unfold. Four days beforehand, on 5 September, eight members of the Palestinian organization Black September invaded the Olympic Village and held eleven Israeli athletes hostage. An estimated nine hundred million television viewers, Moody among them, watched in disbelief as a masked gunman appeared on the balcony of an apartment-turned-prison, and the group’s leader, Issa, emerged, disguised in Blackface, to talk with reporters and officials. The “Games of Peace and Joy”—the first Olympics hosted by Germany since the Nazi regime’s Berlin Games in 1936—were supposed to restore the nation’s reputation by showcasing its turn against militarism, racism, and antisemitism. Instead, West Germany hosted the Munich massacre, an early scene of modern terrorism. Every effort to obtain the athletes’ release failed. The captors refused to back down on their demand that Israel free more than two hundred Arab prisoners; the Israeli government refused to negotiate with terrorists, and the demilitarized German police performed poorly. The terrible twenty-hour day ended in a dramatic nighttime rescue attempt that set off

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a two-hour conflagration of explosions and gunfire. Sixteen people died, including all eleven Israeli hostages.33 The Munich massacre would make PEN’s conference on “Sport and Nationalism” more relevant than ever and also nearly impossible to pull off. Scheduled during the last three days of the 1972 Olympic Games—just a few days after the massacre’s devastating end—presenters and participants disagreed about whether and how the conference should proceed. “After the tragic events of Munich,” Heinrich Böll admitted, “the organizers felt ‘nervous and confused.’” He preferred to cancel or reschedule the conference but gave in to Dutch and Belgian participants who wanted the event to proceed (see figure 6.4).34

Figure 6.4. • Heinrich Böll, author and president of PEN International, at the “Sport and Nationalism” conference in Cologne, Germany, 10 September 1972. Photo and copyright permission by photographer Brigitte Friedrich.

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The “conference atmosphere was testy” when Heinrich Böll and Hermann Kesten, the German PEN president, opened the first day on Saturday morning, 9 September. Moody must have felt the tension when she approached the podium to give the first presentation, a daunting task under any circumstances but especially these. In addition, Moody was the only American, the only woman, and the only Black person on the program. “The horrible events in Munich” had dominated her life for the past several days as she grieved the deaths and worried about what all of this might mean for the safety of Jewish foreigners in Germany, including her own husband and son. One could imagine, then, that Moody began her talk with a sense of trepidation and prefaced it with comments on the tragedy before turning to the text she had prepared weeks earlier.35 Moody’s presentation grew out of her complicated and evolving role as a global citizen. Throughout the talk, she employed a complex and nuanced definition of nationalism, one that derived from her wide-ranging experiences as a demonstrator for civil rights, a protestor against the U.S. war in Vietnam, a keen observer of Black nationalism, a Black Protestant wife of a Jewish White man, a mother of a racially and religiously “mixed” son, and of course as an African American who fled the United States for greater freedom in Europe. As always, Moody spoke with animation, her hands gracefully accentuating her remarks as she explained that nationalism was not simply “fanatic patriotism.” Nationalism demanded “that one identify oneself first as a member of a nation or state or a particular race” in a way that rendered one’s human identity and individuality secondary. Nationalism might use art, science, literature, or sport for its own ends, perverting individual achievements into emblems of national superiority and tools of divisiveness. Sport might be particularly vulnerable to nationalist uses, Moody conceded, given its “mass appeal, its ease of appreciation, its entertainment, circus, violent, emotion-stirring qualities.” But in all of its guises, Moody considered nationalism a threat to individual human rights because it denied their primacy, implicitly sacrificing individual needs to group or national interests.36 Nationalism posed special moral dilemmas for individuals with divergent values. “To allow oneself to act as a representative of one’s nation,” Moody argued, “when one considers it to be utterly corrupt, is to refuse to face one’s moral and human responsibilities in order to stay in good with some regime and feed off whatever measly crumbs of fame and fortune they [sic] offer.” Sometimes, Moody acknowledged, as if commenting on her own life, an individual must choose between “personal safety and security—protecting career, family, etc.—and self-respect, a difficult choice for some, perhaps.” Most athletes would probably prefer to keep sport separate from politics, she noted, to declare it a thing apart, a pris-

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tine arena where fair competition and “sportsmanship” prevail. But athletes on the world stage, Olympic athletes in particular, must understand “the moral ambiguities of their position,” especially when they represent a country that pursues “exploitative and racist policies both at home and abroad.”37 Black American athletes suffered a peculiar contradiction. “Keenly aware” of their nation’s racism, they shouldered a double burden of representing their race and their nation simultaneously. “Just winning and ‘beating Whites,’” Moody pointed out, “is not enough,” because the victories of Black athletes could unintentionally bolster the reputations of racist regimes. Winners from the United States “must make it clear that [their] efforts on the field are not to be interpreted as a ‘win’ for America” but as a victory for “the world’s oppressed minorities.” Sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medal winners, accomplished this in the 1968 Olympics when they stood on the pedestals, each raising a Black-gloved fist while the U.S. national anthem played. Moody interpreted their actions as an important political statement, something each and every athlete must retain the right and even assume the obligation to make.38 Moody did not speak as a disembodied intellectual but as “a onetime college athlete” and “a member of the Black minority in the USA.” She acknowledged that some listeners might charge her with hypocrisy for decrying the impact of nationalist politics on sport even as she urged celebrity athletes to use the platform of fame to protest their countries’ racist and imperialist policies. But racist national policies had already corrupted sport; athletes who protested it were simply trying to turn that clock back—to depoliticize sport by calling out the racist politics that shaped it.39 Later speakers would highlight the ways that sport and athletics reflected the larger society around them, but Moody emphasized how the achievements of individual Black American athletes must illuminate the repression suffered by those less fortunate. “The successful Black athlete is a symbol not only of what the Black man can do if he tries hard and if he’s lucky,” she declared, “but of what so many others could do if given half the chance—and this is true not only in sports but in literature, the arts, the sciences—in all fields where early poverty, hunger, and misery blunt the edge of desire and implant an anger, a hatred, a depression that can make high achievement possible only in the rarest of cases.” Black American Olympians did not reflect the United States and its values, she insisted; they represented, instead, a repudiation of American racism.40 Moody’s main theme—that the relationship between sport and nationalism could only be assessed in context—carried throughout her

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twenty-minute talk. Sport and nationalism could actually help colonized peoples demand and reclaim their independence, she acknowledged, even as she regretted that in “poorer nations sports has a much closer tie to nationalism than in rich countries” because of “the psychology of escapism” and also the “emotional attachments … fostered by those who profit” from exploiting the poor. “Mass spectator sports serve as diversions from more serious economic and political problems,” Moody lamented, but she also acknowledged that “man has many different needs” beyond the political and economic. Moreover, “when the needs for freedom and justice and equal rights are ignored and left unsatisfied,” she noted, “other needs become exaggerated.” As Moody knew only too well, it is here, in the crevices and chasms between human rights and realities, that people often reach for emotional and spiritual fulfillment—through the comfort offered by faith-healing and prophesying, through pride in the athletic achievements of sports heroes.41 Sport need not serve the interests of nationalism, Moody argued. It need not create divisions between groups of people. “It can be a beautiful model,” she insisted, “of what all men have in common, of our mutuality in facing our weaknesses with courage, and of our common need and possible mutual aid” in urging “one another on to greater heights of achievement.” But these things are exactly, she pointed out, “what nations do not do.” In fact, because sport, at its best, is the antithesis of nationalism, Moody called for a transcendent culture of sport that foregrounds “our common humanity, possibility, and need to struggle together.”42 At the same time, Moody recognized that nationalism could in some contexts advance or protect human rights. “Not all nationalisms are the same,” she maintained, and no one should criticize how “third-world nations” might use nationalism in “fighting for their independence.” “Patriotism and nationalism . . . could . . . be beneficial in certain phases of national development” (see figure 6.5).43 Moody’s text offered no clear sense of how—or whether—she weighed the nationalist interests of Palestinians and Israelis in the immediate aftermath of the Munich massacre. Did she recognize the five Palestinians who died alongside their Israeli hostages as activists engaged in an extreme form of civil disobedience—one that charged the ultimate price—on behalf of a colonized people? Or did she thoroughly condemn all eight Palestinian terrorists for violating the human rights of the eleven Israeli athletes they murdered? All we know for sure is that Moody was deeply troubled by the violent deaths that marred the 1972 Olympics. “Why, in view of the horrible events in Munich,” she asked during a session the next day, were presenters talking about “such an academic topic as ‘Sport and Performance’?” She was grateful when conference

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Figure 6.5. • Anne Moody at PEN’s “Sport and Nationalism” conference, 10 September 1972, in Cologne, Germany. Photo and copyright permission by photographer Brigitte Friedrich.

organizers canceled the scheduled Sunday afternoon event in favor of a commemoration hour for the Munich victims.44 In the end, PEN’s “Sport and Nationalism” conference was neither well attended by Frankfurters nor particularly well received by the journalists who covered it. One even titled his report “One Seldom Yawned So Much” and complained that the conference achieved “no tangible result.” Moody’s speech was, however, frequently singled out as among the most interesting, and nearly fifty years later, Brigitte Friedrich, who photographed the conference, remembered that Moody spoke “passionately”—hers was “the sensational contribution of the evening.”45 More importantly, with this powerful presentation delivered to an international audience, Moody combined truth-telling about American racism with cosmopolitan insights on nationalism, sport, and human rights. Her role as a global citizen took on new and increasingly intellectual dimensions as she reached well beyond her own country and her own life to comment on issues of race and rights in a world divided into nations, subdivided into colonies, and warring over resources and economic philosophies.

150 • Leigh Ann Wheeler

Moody would stay in Germany for the next two years, sometimes at the Bölls’ home in Cologne, more often in the chicken house in Geiselbach, and also back in Berlin. By the time she returned to the United States permanently, she had, as she hoped, gained the new perspective she longed for when she had left in 1969. As an activist in the civil rights movement, Moody recalled having “an almost spiritual sense that in America, of all places”—in America, “racism would ultimately crumble before reason and morals,” and “the U.S. would lead the world in defending human rights.” Instead, she found that despite a “few visible gains . . . nothing seemed to change . . . at the root things always remained the same.” In retrospect, she concluded, “we were too isolated and self-absorbed in our preoccupation with the Negro problem.” She also understood how “despair and hatred of White America” might drive a young person to become a Black Panther, because she had experienced that same despair and hatred. But she feared that the Black Panthers would create a “narrowly nationalistic” movement, more isolated and self-absorbed than ever. “The universal fight for human rights, dignity, justice, equality and freedom is not and should not be just a fight of the American Negro, or the Indians, or the Chicanos,” Moody insisted. “It’s the fight of every ethnic and racial minority of every suppressed and exploited person—every one of the millions who daily suffers one or another of the indignities of the powerless and voiceless masses.” Thus, after years of living in Europe, Moody found that even as her world enlarged, so did her adversary. “The monster that I’m wrestling with now,” she wrote, “is a much more fearsome beast than my previous target, Mississippi.”46 Anne Moody began her trajectory into global citizenship in the 1970s, when she took Coming of Age in Mississippi to an international audience. She worked with translators, participated in interviews, delivered speeches, and made friends in France and Germany. Moody’s story helped East and West Germans grapple with and denounce their own country’s history of genocidal racism while deepening their knowledge of and anger about American racism. Awareness of and sensitivities to American and German varieties of racism would animate international movements to free Angela Davis. Moody’s years in Europe broadened her perspective, moving it from an exclusive focus on civil rights for African Americans to a more expansive vision of human rights for all. Even as Moody developed a nuanced, critical analysis of nationalism, she defied stereotypes and expectations. At a time when Black intellectuals and activists who did not welcome Black nationalism were suspect, Moody questioned nationalisms of all sorts. While embracing the beauty and enduring power of Black culture,

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she sought to advance a vision that promoted universal understanding, respect, and finding common ground. Unfortunately for her, this vision was out of step with the dominant mood of U.S. Black activists. A voice crying in the wilderness, Moody would have difficulty finding an audience for her ideas. Once a celebrated author who told a story many Americans wanted to hear, by the late 1970s Moody struggled to make ends meet and began a peripatetic life, dependent on the support of friends and family. Former Black Panther Angela Davis would go on to win her freedom and become a famous and adored professor, author, and speaker. In 2018, she sold her personal papers to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University for an undisclosed sum.47 By contrast, Anne Moody would become a prisoner of poverty, unstable mental health, and, she believed, ongoing surveillance and harassment by the state. Often homeless with a son to care for, she would lose access to most of her writing. What did survive—a collection of personal journals and artifacts—was treated cavalierly by the archive that acquired it. Parts of the collection were destroyed, and none of it is available to researchers today. Moody did not live a success story. As a result, her legacy—which includes her efforts to advocate for civil and human rights as a global citizen in the 1970s— nearly vanished.48 Leigh Ann Wheeler is a professor of history at Binghamton University, former coeditor (with Jean Quataert) of the Journal of Women’s History, former senior editor of Oxford University Press’s Research Encyclopedia in American History, and author of Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is currently writing the first biography of civil rights activist and memoirist Anne Moody.

Notes 1. I use the phrase “Black Freedom movement” to encompass both the civil rights and the Black Power movements. On these topics, see especially Davis, Mausbch, Klimke, and MacDougall, Changing the World, Changing Oneself; Klimke, The Other Alliance; Gerund, Transatlantic Cultural Exchange; Höhn and Klimke, A Breath of Freedom; Greene and Ortlepp, Germans and African Americans; Schroer, Recasting Race after World War II; Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Sarah B. Snyder,

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2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Boston, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Royster and Cochran, “Human Rights and Civil Rights”; Germain, “A ‘New’ Black Nationalism in the USA and France”; Maria I. Diedrich, “Black ‘Others’?: African Americans and Black Germans in the Third Reich,” in Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics, and Culture, edited by Sara Lennox (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusettes Press, 2016), 135–48; and Kosc, Juncker, Monteith, and Waldschmidt-Nelson, eds., The Transatlantic Sixties. Older scholarship in this genre includes Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); James Campbell, Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank (Palo Alto: University of California Press, 1995); Rosa Bobia, The Critical Reception of James Baldwin in France (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). Anne Moody, “Lecture at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, 1985 February 21,” three VHS tapes, University of Mississippi Special Collections, Oxford, MS (hereafter Moody lecture, UMSC). References that Anne makes in the video to the upcoming Democratic National Convention in San Francisco make clear that it must have been made before July 1984, so the date and the title of this lecture are inaccurate. Moody lecture, UMSC. Moody lecture, UMSC. Others included Frances Beal, who lived in France from 1959 to 1966; Angela Davis, who studied at the University of Frankfurt and Humboldt University in West and East Berlin, respectively, in the 1960s. Loretta J. Ross interview with Frances Beal for the Sophia Smith Collection, “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project,” 18 March 2005, http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/tran scripts/Beal.pdf. Peter Härtling to Heinrich Böll, 21 February 1969 and 11 March 1969; Heinrich Böll to Härtling, 7 March 1969; “Excerpt from the contract of 4/20/69 between Anne Moody . . . and S. Fischer Associates,” S. Fischer Verlag Collection, Deutsches Literatur Archiv, Marbach am Neckar, Germany (hereafter SFV-DLAM). (All German texts translated by professor Michael Thomas Taylor unless noted otherwise.) Heinrich Böll regularly received credit for Annemarie’s translation work and often negotiated with publishers on her behalf. Heinrich Böll to Härtling, 4 April 1969; Härtling to Annemarie Böll, 1 October 1969; Annemarie Böll to Härtling, 16 and 22 October 1969, SFV-DLAM. Moody’s English title was suggested by her Dial editor, Joyce Johnson, and borrowed from Margaret Mead’s 1928 pathbreaking study Coming of Age in Samoa, but the German translation did not. Mead’s book did not appear in German until 1974, and only then as Kindheit und Jugend in Samoa (Children and youth in Samoa) (Munich: DTV, 1974). Hans-Jürgen Schmitt to Annemarie Böll, 3 November 1969; Härtling to Heinrich Böll, 17 December 1969; Annemarie Böll to Schmitt, 27 December 1969, SFV-DLAM. B. Breon Mitchell translated “Farewell to Uncle Tom” for Mike

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

O’Brien (26 April 1998), who shared it with the author. Original, “Abschied von Onkel Tom,” can be found in Anne Moody, Erwachen in Mississippi: Eine Autobiographie (Hamburg: Fischer, 1972), 7–10; Maria Frisé, “Flucht aus Onkel Toms Hütte: Ann [sic] Moody, ein Leben zwischen Alpund Freiheitsträumen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (22 August 1970); Moody to Wolfgang Mertz, 8 February 1970, SFV-DLAM. Moody requested an English translation of Böll’s foreword after the book had been published. That she quickly developed a close relationship with the Bölls, especially Heinrich, indicates that she was pleased with his work. Debra Spencer, “Anne Moody Oral History Interview,” 57–58, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 19 February 1985, http:// www.mdah.ms.gov/arrec/digital_archives/vault/projects/OHtranscripts/ AU076_096117.pdf (hereafter Spencer interview). Schmitt to Annemarie Böll, 3 November 1969; Mertz to Moody, 28 January 1970; Moody to Mertz, 8 February 1970, SFV-DLAM. Moody to Mertz, 8 February 1970, SFV-DLAM. Moody lecture, UMSC. Moody lecture, UMSC. Moody to Mertz, 23 February 1970; Mertz to Heinrich Böll, 27 February 1970, SFV-DLAM. I have not yet found evidence that Der Stern contacted Moody. Moody lecture, UMSC; Härtling to Moody, 16 March 1970; Härtling to Heinrich Böll, 16 March 1970; SFV-DLAM. Härtling fell ill and had to withdraw from the events associated with Moody’s visit, but agreed that “it’s worth it to meet Anne Moody.” The copy of Erwachen in Mississippi that Moody inscribed to Härtling still occupies an honored place in his widow’s library. It reads: “March 17, 1970. To: Mr. Peter Härtling. Thanks so much for the flowers. I was truly sorry to hear of your illness. I hope you are well and soon up. Thanks also to Fischer for the energy they have shown for my book.” Mechthild Hardener (Härtling’s widow) email to Michael Taylor, 24 September 2019. Annemarie Böll, “Anne Moody: Erwachen in Mississippi,” Heinrich Böll Papers, Historical Archive of the City of Cologne, Germany (hereafter HBP-HACC); “Erwachen in Missisippi: The American author Anne Moody in Frankfurt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 March 1970, 65: 43; “Fleisch der Weißen,” Der Spiegel, 5 April 1970; “Ein Mädchen aus Mississippi: Anne Moody stellte sich vor,” unidentified newspaper article, n.d., shared with author by Taryn Blake, who found them in the Anne Moody Scrapbook Collection, Emory University, Rose Library. (This collection is no longer available.) “Ein Mädchen aus Mississippi: Anne Moody stellte sich vor,” unnamed newspaper article, n.d., shared with the author by Taryn Blake, who found it in the Anne Moody Scrapbook Collection, Emory University, Rose Library. (This collection is no longer available.); Moody lecture, UMSC. Curtis Daniell, “Germany: Trouble Spot for Black GIs,” Ebony 23, no. 10 (August 1968): 124–28; “GI in Germany Says It’s Like Selma, Alabama,” Jet (8 August 1968): 46–47; “Black Explosions in West Germany,” Time 96, no. 12 (21 September 1970): 36; Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, “‘We Shall Overcome’: The Impact of the African American Freedom Struggle on Race Relations and Social Protest in Germany after World War II,” in Kosc, Juncker, Monteith, and Waldschmidt-Nelson, eds., The Transatlantic Sixties, 66–97; Höhn and Klimke,

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18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

A Breath of Freedom, 96, 143–45; “Was Uns Gesach,” Hamburger Abendblatt, 8 May 1970. Mike O’Brien telephone interview with Austin Straus, August/September 2016, transcript shared with author; Spencer interview, 58; Moody lecture, UMSC; Michael Scheffel emails to author 13, 14, 15, 16 August 2018; author telephone interview with Scheffel, 15 August 2018. Ibid.; Scheffel email with photographs attached, 24 September 2018; author telephone interview with Cathy Niederhaus, (pseudonym used at her request) 31 August 2019. Maria Frisè, “Flucht aus Onkel Toms Hütte,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 August 1970; author telephone interview with Cathy Niederhaus, 26 April 2018. Author telephone interview with Cathy Niederhaus, 26 April 2018; “Was Uns Gesach,” Hamburger Abendblatt, 8 May 1970; Wolf Donner, “Zu Empfehlen,” Die Zeit, 3 July 1970; Erwachen in Mississippi on Bestseller Lists in Der Spiegel: 9th (13 July 1970 and 28 November 1970); 10th (17 and 24 August 1970). Gerund, Transatlantic Cultural Exchange, 104–7. Davis declared her innocence in January 1971. Klimke, The Other Alliance, 135–36. Moody’s son, Sasha Straus, would later write: “that entire book cover . . . does not look like Anne but somebody in a blaxploitation movie or on Soul Train from the late 1960s to early 1979.” Sasha Straus text to author, 9 October 2019. “Mit Ketchup und Senf bekleistert: Anne Moody shreibt im Spessart,” Pardon (September 1970); “Der Tip Des Buch-Händlers,” Hamburger Abendblatt, 4 October 1970; author telephone interview with Scheffel, 15 August 2018. Author telephone interview with Scheffel, 15 August 2018; author telephone interviews with Cathy Niederhaus (pseudonym used at her request), 31 August 2019; 12 April 2018. Author telephone interviews with Cathy Niederhaus, 31 August 2019; 12 April 2018. Höhn and Klimke, A Breath of Freedom, 145, 156, 162. Höhn and Klimke, A Breath of Freedom, 124–25; “Anne Moody, ‘Erwachen in Mississippi,’” Sibylle Hentschke, n.d.; Wolfgang Mertz to Hans Bentien, 2 and 21 October 1970, Verlag Neues Leben File, Eulenspiegel Verlagsgruppe, Berlin, Germany (hereafter VNL-EV); “Protest gegen rassistisches Unrecht: Anne Moody Autobiographie im Verlag Neues Leben,” Neue Zeit, 17, 6 (20 January 1972). Austin remembered the DAAD fellowship as having been arranged by Heinrich Böll. An internal DAAD letter notes the unusual absence of an application in Anne Moody’s file. Mike O’Brien telephone interview with Austin Straus, August/September 2016, transcript shared with author; Barbara Wollmann to Wilhelm Zimmermann, 3 April 1973, Abteilung Literatur, Literarische Gäste, 1969/70—1972/73, Archives of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany; Moody lecture, UMSC; Spencer interview. Spencer interview; Austin Straus, “Even Paranoids. . . ,” in Intensifications (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2010), 52. O’Brien telephone interview with Austin Straus, August/September 2016, transcript shared with author; Moody, “Personal Account to PEN’s Freedom to

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32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

Write Committee,” n.d., P.E.N. American Center Records, Princeton University Library; Austin Straus, “Déjá Vu,” Drunk with Light (Pasadena, 2002), 43. Several family members—on Austin’s side as well as Moody’s—believe that Austin did have affairs while married to Moody. “Böll eröfffnete PEN-Tagung ‘Sport und Nationalismus,’” Suddeütsche Zeitung, 10 September 1972; Heinrich Böll and Wilhelm Unger to PEN Colleagues, 28 August 1972, Paul Schälluck Papers, Historical Archive of the City of Cologne, Germany (hereafter PSP-HACC). News coverage of the Munich massacre was plentiful. See especially the documentary by Kevin McDonald, “One Day in September,” 1999: www.youtube .com/watch?v=p8VHxcb8kFA; John Goshko, “11 Israelis, 4 Arab Guerillas Die in Day of Olympics Terror, Washington Post, 6 September 1972. The Olympic committee halted the games for twenty-four hours and arranged a morning memorial service on 6 September at the stadium, but events resumed hours after the hostage crisis reached its violent end. “On the International Conference ‘Sport and Nationalism,’ in Cologne,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung (25 September 1972). This event is mentioned only briefly in Jochen Schubert’s biography Heinrich Böll (Stuttgart, 2017), 208–9. Ibid.; Anne Moody, “Sport and Nationalism,” 11 September 1972 (actually delivered 9 September 1972), PSP-HACC. Anne Moody, “Sport and Nationalism,” 11 September 1972 (actually delivered 9 September 1972), PSP-HACC. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Anne Moody, “Sport and Nationalism,” 11 September 1972 (actually delivered 9 September 1972), PSP-HACC. Throughout this speech, Moody referred to the generic athlete using masculine pronouns. “Selten so gegähnt: Flemischen, niederländisches und deutsches PEN-Zentrum diskutierten in Köln über ‘Sport und Nationalismus,’” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 September 1972. “Schriftsteller und Sport: Zur internationalen Tagung ‘Sport und Nationalismus’ in Köln,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 25 September 1972; “Böll eröffnete PENTagung ‘Sport und Nationalismus,’” Suddeutsche Zeitung, 10 September 1972; “Die Zwei Seiten des sports: PEN-Tagung: ‘Sport und Nationalismus,’” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 September 1972; “Internationale Tagung: Sport und Nationalismus: Programm,” September 1972, PSP-HACC. One author, Peter O. Chotjewitz, was reported to have avoided the commemoration because, although he mourned for the Israeli athletes who were killed, he believed that the press “appears to forget . . . the misfortune of the Palestinians.” Jörg Drews, “Selten so gegähnt: Flämisches, niederländisches und deutsches PEN-Zentrum diskutierten in Köln über ‘Sport und Nationalismus,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 September 1972. Jörg Drews, “Selten so gegähnt: Flämisches, niederländisches und deutsches PEN-Zentrum diskutierten in Köln über ‘Sport und Nationalismus,” Süddeut-

156 • Leigh Ann Wheeler sche Zeitung, 14 September 1972; Brigitte Friedrich email to author, 9 October 2019. 46. “An Evening with Anne Moody, Canton, Miss.” (27 February 1985), series 14, box 48b, T020, MDAH. At one time, this tape was mislabeled “Joyce Ladner interview with Anne Moody.” 47. See the library’s announcement at https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-andideas/schlesinger-library-acquires-the-angela-y-davis-papers. 48. Anne Moody passed away at the age of seventy-four on 5 February 2015. That her obituary appeared in such prominent places as the New York Times is a testament to the power and popularity of her 1968 memoir. See Margalit Fox, “Anne Moody, Author of ‘Coming of Age in Mississippi,’” Dies at 74,” New York Times, 17 February 2015.

Bibliography Davis, Belinda, Wilfried Mausbch, Martin Klimke, and Carla MacDougall. Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Germain, Felix. “A ‘New’ Black Nationalism in the USA and France.” Journal of African American Studies 18 (2014): 286–304. Gerund, Katharina. Transatlantic Cultural Exchange: African American Women’s Art and Activism in West Germany. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013. Greene, Larry A., and Anke Ortlepp. Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011. Höhn, Maria, and Martin Klimke. A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, American GIs and Germany. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Klimke, Martin. The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010. Kosc, Grzegorz, Clara Juncker, Sharon Monteith, and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, eds. The Transatlantic Sixties: Europe and the United States in the Counterculture Decade. Berlin: Transcript Verlag, 2013. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Molly Cochran. “Human Rights and Civil Rights: The Advocacy and Activism of African-American Women Writers.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2011): 213–30. Schroer, Timothy L. Recasting Race after World War II: Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2007.

CHAPTER 7

E E E Contested Progress Women and Women’s Studies in the East and West German Historical Profession Karen Hagemann

Jean Quataert belonged to the first generation of female scholars of Central European history who systematically included the perspective of women’s and gender history in their research. Her dissertation Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917, which was published by Princeton University Press in 1979, was pathbreaking. She visited Germany regularly for her research in the archives, lectures and workshops. We came in contact in the 1980s because of our shared interest in the history of the German social democratic women’s movement. Later, we both started to work on the subject of gender, war, and the nation, and therefore continued to meet for conferences on both sides of the Atlantic. We became not only colleagues but also friends. Most rewarding was our joint work on the volume Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography, which we published together in 2007 in English and in 2008 in German. The volume included a longer cowritten introductory chapter titled “Gendering German History: Comparing Historiographies and Academic Cultures in Germany and the U.S. through the Lens of Gender.” The collaborative work on the book and the chapter reinforced my interest in a comparative gender history of academic systems and the historical profession. In 2007, I edited together with María Teresa Fernández-Aceves a History Practice Section in the Journal of Women’s History titled “Gendering Trans/National Historiographies: Similarities and Differences in Comparison.” As one of the journal’s editors Jean Quataert had supported this project, which was based on a series of two roundtables for the 2005 Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians that we had organized together. Our joint work on this subject inspired my larger research project titled “Broken Progress: Men, Women, and the Transformation of the East and West German Historical Profession since 1945,” which I recently started. The chapter for this volume presents first results.1

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Early Critique of the Male Dominance in Historiography in West and East Germany “In international comparison, the historical profession in the Federal Republic can claim the dubious distinction of having, even in the past ten years, largely ignored the existence of women in personnel policy and research work.”2 This is how Karin Hausen, professor of economic and social history at West Berlin’s Technical University since 1978, commented upon the situation of women and women’s history in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in an article on women’s history in the United States that appeared in the West German journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft in 1981. The journal had been founded six years before by social historians as an alternative to the venerable and conservative Historische Zeitschrift. Like Gisela Bock, Annette Kuhn, and Heide Wunder, Hausen was among the first female professors in the Federal Republic to dedicate teaching and research systematically to women’s and gender history. Following the U.S. model, these scholars and a rapidly growing number of young women—many of them from the new women’s movement, who finished their doctorates and habilitations in the 1970s and 1980s with the hope of making careers as historians—aspired to integrate women on an equal basis into the profession and the university overall. They also wanted the historical profession in West Germany, like that in the United States, to open itself to the theories, methods and themes of women’s and gender history. More than fourteen years earlier, at a workshop on “Woman and Scholarship” in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Leipzig historian Joachim Müller, the longtime chairman of the East German Study Group of the History of the Working-Class Struggle for Women’s Emancipation (Forschungsgemeinschaft zur Geschichte des Kampfes der Arbeiterklasse um die Befreiung der Frau), founded in 1966, declared: Our textbooks show that our image of history has nothing in common with the notorious thesis that men make history. One nevertheless gains the impression that it is men who made and make history. We believe that the curricula, textbooks and materials of all kinds should consider and answer the questions posed not just by a reading working man, but also by a reading working woman.3

But the GDR did not succeed in implementing this program either. Despite all the socialist rhetoric on women’s emancipation, women did not have equal opportunities at the universities more generally or in the discipline of history, and women’s history remained a marginal topic in research, teaching, and public history up to 1990, similar to West Germany.

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At first glance, the significant differences in the political, social, and university systems of the FRG and the GDR may seem to render an EastWest comparison of the integration of women and women’s history into the historical profession irrelevant. Thus far we have no comparative studies of the subject.4 Only the male-dominated history of the discipline in general,5 the late integration of women into the historical profession in West Germany,6 and the development of women’s and gender history in the FRG have been studied to date.7 The highly developed mainstream research on the historical profession in the FRG and GDR up to reunification8 and the effects of the so-called Hochschulumbau Ost (the reconstruction of higher education in the East) on history in the old and new federal states has largely ignored the gender dimension.9 The only gendered research we do have explores either the integration of women in FRG and GDR universities more generally10 or the development of West German women’s and gender studies.11 This chapter attempts to explain the causes of the persistent disadvantages faced by women at universities in the two German states based on the example of the historical profession, a discipline of central importance for the formulation of historical “master narratives” to interpret the past.12 The chapter combines university history and the history of science with gender history13 and explores women’s changing position in the historical profession in East and West Germany as well as the degree of inclusion of women’s or gender history. After all, the rise in the proportion of women among doctoral and habilitation candidates as well as instructors in the 1980s and 1990s was at least in West Germany closely connected with the establishment of women’s and gender history. In the FRG, many young women who began their doctorate or habilitation in the 1980s chose women’s and later gender history as their research field. A few of the first female history professors also gained professorships in the FRG that were explicitly dedicated (at least in part) to “women’s and gender history.”14 This association gradually disappeared with the growing number of female historians who had completed their doctorate and habilitation since the 1990s. Women were increasingly doing research in a wide variety of historical fields, a trend that was evident from the very beginning in the GDR. In what follows, I will ask which factors promoted or hindered the inclusion of women and women’s or gender history. These factors include the institutional structures of the higher education system and the historical tradition and academic culture of the discipline, along with the underlying political and societal conditions. Since most of these factors have a long “path dependence,” it is necessary to begin the analysis before 1949.15 For that reason, I will first outline the situation of the univer-

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sities in the two German states before and after 1945 and then proceed to a comparison of important structural differences and developmental trends of the university system in the GDR and FRG, in order to compare the development of the historical profession in the two Germanies. The chapter ends with the effects of the Hochschulumbau Ost after German reunification.16

German Universities before and after 1945 After World War II, many German universities in all four occupation zones had lost most of their buildings and libraries to bombing, especially in the big cities. The surviving library holdings had been “purged” by the Nazis. The faculty was massively decimated by the dismissal of all Jewish instructors or people otherwise anathema to the Nazi regime as well as victims of the war.17 Most of the remaining staff had become part of the National Socialist regime by joining its academic organizations, such as the National Socialist German Students’ Union (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) or the National Socialist German Lecturers League (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund).18 The generation of male university instructors who resumed teaching in East and West Germany after 1945 had been shaped by the experience of Nazism and the traditional university system of the Ordinarienuniversität, in which the small group of tenured full professors at the top of departments made all decisions and controlled teaching and research. This difficult situation posed a great challenge to any attempt at university reform after 1945.19 To be sure, the early postwar years saw intense debates in all four occupation zones over a rejection of the elitist and hierarchical tradition of the old-style Ordinarienuniversität. The Allies promoted these discussions by calling for denazification and democratization of German universities and fostering university reform.20 The economic, social, and political conditions of the postwar era, however, significantly limited the opportunities for a university reform and, even in the East, according to Konrad H. Jarausch, hindered “efforts at a democratic and socialist new beginning,” which would have signaled “a fundamental break with many of the traditions functionalized and thus damaged by Nazism.”21 This reconstruction, Jarausch continues, was promoted not just by the Soviet occupying power “in order to prevent the return of ‘Hitlerism.’ It was also a result of demands by the German labor movement, for example for an expansion of access to higher education for the children of workers and farmers through the establishment of Arbeiter- und Bauernfakultäten.”22

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The demand of such Workers’ and Farmers’ Colleges (ABFs) was realized in the GDR, beginning in 1949. Their aim was to prepare the children of workers and farmers for university studies.23 The Allies’ call for a social opening and democratization of the universities was also shared by Communist and Social Democratic politicians as well as a minority of liberal university professors in the western occupation zones.24 Among most professors in the West (and at the beginning, in the East as well), it encountered, however, reservations and resistance. The tradition of the German universities and technical colleges as institutions dominated by the Ordinarien and dedicated to educating a male elite continued to enjoy strong support.25 An academic culture of marked misgivings about integrating women into university studies, research, and teaching were part of this tradition.26 According to a survey that the social psychologist Hans Anger conducted in 1953/54 under 138 West German university professors and that was published in 1960, 24 percent of the respondents “fundamentally” rejected female students, 40 percent disliked women in academic teaching, 40 percent opposed female students and instructors “to some extent.”27 As the main reason, 54 percent stated that women lacked “intellectual or productive-creative abilities.” Thirty-seven percent believed that a professorship contradicted “the nature, the biological purpose and the natural conditions of women.”28 Forty-three percent of the respondents were convinced that women were inferior to men in “thinking ability, criticism and intelligence.”29 Correspondingly, the respondents attributed “good performance in men to skills,” but explained “equally good or sometimes even better achievements by women, not by their knowledge and skills,” but by endeavoring to overcome “their lack of intellectual ability by an increased learning zeal and mechanical memorization.”30 Anger’s survey documents the persistent misogyny of West German university professors, who still believed that women had no place in academia because they were not suitable for it. The opinion of historians cited by Anger in the survey did not differ from those of other professors. The tradition of such a misogynist position, which was also widespread under East German professors, had made it difficult for women to achieve equal access to study, academic research, and teaching. Not before 1909, women had gained access to a university education in all federal states of the German Empire, against massive resistance in politics and academia. The number and percentage of female students increased at first only slowly: from 4 percent (7 percent in history) in 1909/10 to 6 percent (13 percent in history) in 1913/14. It was not until the Weimar Republic that the number of female students rose more substan-

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tially. By 1932/33 the average proportion of women students reached 19 percent. The figure continued to be higher in the field of history, because women studying this subject had a realistic chance at a career; they could become teachers at academic secondary schools (Gymnasien). A total of 584 women were enrolled in the discipline in 1932/33, representing 29 percent of students. But during the first years of the Nazi regime, the overall percentage of female students fell to 14 percent; the figure in history was 16 percent. Nazi policy attempted to limit women’s university access mainly for ideological reasons. The Nazis wanted young “Aryan” women to become first and foremost dedicated “German mothers.” During World War II, however, this policy quickly changed: more and more women were admitted to universities in order to replace conscripted and fallen men, especially in the teaching and health professions. The proportion of women among students rose to 32 percent by 1941 and even 49 percent by 1943/44. In history it was already 51 percent in 1941; at that time, 412 women were enrolled in the discipline. Most female students, like their male counterparts, came from educated and welloff families who desired and could afford a good secondary education and university studies for their daughters.31 Few women who studied history gained a doctorate. In all, 414 women did so up to 1933, the great majority of them defending their dissertations after 1918. An important reason was that the only employment opportunities for women with doctorates in history were next to academic secondary schools, museums, archives, and academic libraries. Women were also required to remain unmarried if they wished to keep their jobs. Because of the so-called double-earner ban of May 1932, married female employees and civil servants had to be dismissed from the civil service.32 Even fewer women pursued the second dissertation (Habilitation), the precondition for becoming a tenured full professor or teaching at German universities as a private instructor (Privatdozent) and adjunct professor (außerplanmäßiger Professor). Until 1920 women were not even allowed to defend a Habilitation. In order to prevent “the admission of women to academic careers” after the universities were opened to female students, the Prussian education minister excluded them from the habilitation process in 1908, arguing that women’s involvement in academic teaching “is consistent neither with the present system nor with the interests of the universities.”33 Other federal states followed the Prussian example. In the new Weimar Republic, this ban on the habilitation for woman was finally lifted in all federal states, including Prussia. Nevertheless, only two women—Ermentrude Bäcker, née Ranke (1922), and Hedwig Hintze-Guggenheimer (1928)—defended their Habilitation in history before 1933, and two more—Hedwig Fleischhacker (1938)

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and Wilhelmine Hagen (1943)—during the Nazi period.34 Thus up to 1945, teaching history at German universities remained largely closed to women. When the universities reopened after World War II, there were successful efforts in the three western occupation zones to drastically decrease women’s presence at the universities in both absolute and percental terms in favor of men. Given the massive pressure of returning soldiers wanting entry into university, women were initially allowed to study only if they were almost finished with their degrees or had to earn their own living as war widows.35 This policy was in keeping with the postwar agenda of the Western Allies, but also the leading conservative sister parties Christian Democratic and Christian Social Union. Their aim was to restore the prewar gender order by labor market, social, and family policies that assigned men the role of the “family breadwinner” and women that of “housewife and mother.”36 In the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ), female students were not officially discriminated against after 1945; in fact, official policy of the Soviet Military Administration was to treat them equally, but since students from workers’ and farmers’ families, those who had been persecuted by the Nazis and graduates of the university preparatory institutes set up for war veterans were systematically given preference, the proportion of women students fell significantly here as well.37 In light of the massive surplus of women, the SBZ and later the GDR needed them in the first postwar decade first and foremost as workers.38 As a consequence of these postwar admission policies, the total number of students rose significantly in all four occupation zones after the war. In the East, because of a general qualification offensive, the figure increased from 8,171 in 1945 to 30,000 in 1950, 20,668 of them at the universities.39 In the West, the number of students reached 133,514 that same year, 84,567 at universities.40 But the proportion of women fell in the East from 42 percent in 1945/46 to 21 percent in 1951/52 and in the West from 22 percent to 16 percent.41

General Trends in Higher Education in both Postwar States Higher education was a public task in both newly founded states from 1949 on, although in the GDR it was controlled by the centralized state and in the FRG by the federal states, the Länder, as defined by the Basic Law, the new constitution of May 1949. At first, the GDR broke with old traditions and built a new system of higher education around six traditional universities and three technical universities founded between the

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1960s and the 1980s, along with a number of other colleges.42 An “inner reorganization” of the higher education system was pursued at the same time, with the objective of changing the social composition of students, researchers, and teachers.43 From the beginning, the education policy of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) aimed to create a new power elite loyal to the party. To this end, research and teaching were placed under the control of the state and the SED. Studying was a privilege in the GDR, granted not only according to the academic achievements in the Abitur examination at the end of secondary school graduation, but according to other criteria as well including social origins, dedication to socialism, membership of socialist organizations, and voluntary military service as an officer candidate. A numerus clausus together with this mix of social and political criteria decided upon admission to higher education. The state-regulated number of pupils who took the Abitur and entered university was oriented mainly toward the needs of the economy, society, and the sciences. The socialist state determined how many university graduates were needed in which field.44 The total number of students admitted to universities in the GDR rose from 28,500 in 1949 to 160,967 in 1972, only to drop, with some fluctuations, to 131,088 in 1989. From the 1970s, the proportion of students among each age group in the population also fell, so that the figure in 1989 was just half of that in the FRG.45 From the outset, the goal of SED policy was a systematic exploitation of all educational reserves in the interest of economic growth. As a result, the state massively promoted university study first for the children of workers and farmers and later also for women, who were to be encouraged to study technology and the natural sciences.46 This policy changed the social composition of students in the GDR. In the first two decades, a significant portion of the student body was made up of children from workers’ and farmers’ families. In 1961 they made up 53 percent of students who went to university. Between 1951 and 1963, 43,600 of them entered university via the newly introduced ABFs.47 In 1961 some 20 percent came from white-collar families and only 17 percent from professional families.48 The proportion of workers’ and farmers’ children was especially high among students of mathematics, natural sciences, technology, agriculture, and forestry, while there was still a relatively large number of children from the “intelligentsia” among students of medicine, the humanities, and languages.49 This composition changed in the decades that followed, however. In the late 1950s the SED introduced a policy that led to an increasing social closure of GDR universities. The educational privilege of the social elites that had persisted until the end of World War II was replaced by that of the new elite of the “socialist intelligentsia.” As a consequence, in 1989 some 32 percent of students came from families of the intelligentsia, the

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proportion of working-class children remained relatively constant at 55 percent, and the children of white-collar employees fell to 7 percent.50 In the GDR as in the FRG, however, female students and doctoral candidates tended to come from homes with higher educational and income levels than male students. The traditional idea that young women would marry, and thus receiving a higher education would be superfluous, continued to be stronger in the working classes of both states.51 Such deep-rooted prejudices could only slowly be changed by a systematic promotion of women’s academic education beginning in the mid-1950s and more targeted measures in the 1960s. The result was an increasing proportion of women among GDR students since the early 1960s. Until the late 1950s their proportion lingered around 26 percent. In 1970 it reached 35 percent, and in 1989 it peaked at 49 percent.52 This increase significantly surpassed that in the FRG. Women’s average quota of doctorates and habilitations (known since the 1950s as Doctorate A and B) in the GDR grew to 36 percent and 13 percent, respectively, in 1988/89, and was far higher than in the FRG at 26 percent and 9 percent, respectively.53 This development was fostered from the 1970s on by a policy of special social measures such as a broad network of all-day childcare for children of all ages, as well as generous leave policies that allowed even unmarried women with children to study and gain their doctorates and habilitations.54 Alongside the general state funding for students, mothers who studied received additional support for each child. As a consequence, in the late 1980s every twelfth female student was a mother, twice as many as in the West.55 Unlike the Federal Republic, where well into the 1960s secondary schools, museums, archives, and academic libraries continued to be the only workplaces open to women with doctorates, in the GDR the socalled Mittelbau (mid-level academic positions) at the universities were already opened to women in the 1950s. With suitable qualifications and the right political attitudes, women could become research associates (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterinnen), research assistants (wissenschaftliche Assistententinnen) or senior research assistants (Oberassistentinnen), lecturers (Lektorinnen), or instructors (Dozentinnen), with generally permanent positions. The average proportion of women in some of these Mittelbau positions exceeded the proportion of female students. It was highest among lecturers at 35 percent in 1955.56 This development was fostered by the GDR’s lifting of the ban on so-called double earners in 1949. In the West, the Federal Civil Service Law was amended in this respect not before 1953.57 All attempts in the GDR, however, to promote the integration of women into natural sciences, technology, and engineering could not

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change the trend that women tended to study and pursue an academic career in the fields of education (proportion of women in 1989: 73 percent), economics (67 percent), literature and languages (62 percent), and medicine (55 percent). As in the West, school teaching remained the female profession par excellence.58 All those whose bourgeois origins, Christian faith, or political stance made them unacceptable to the GDR system were excluded from studying. Access to higher education, and with it to secure career opportunities, was thus an important instrument of discipline wielded by the SED in the GDR state, society, economy, and culture.59 In the FRG, the higher education system changed relatively little into the 1960s with regard to its institutional structures, the hierarchy of its personnel, and its academic culture. After World War II, any more fundamental attempts of a university reform did not find political support in West Germany.60 At most of the twenty-five West German universities that opened up to 1949 (including fourteen old universities and four newly founded),61 the experience of forced politicization under Nazism instead led to a backward-looking revival: the majority of the full professors supported a return to the tradition of the Ordinarienuniversität before 1933. The autonomy of the universities, the freedom of research and teaching, and the separation of scholarship and politics became central ideals in the Cold War context and the process of disassociation from the GDR.62 The tradition of an extremely socially segregating, hierarchical culture of the German higher education system was only broken down in the FRG in the course of educational reform in the 1960s and 1970s. These reforms also led to a growing social opening of the universities, which already had begun in the mid-1950s. During this reform era, fundamental structural reforms of the higher education system were undertaken for the first time, accompanied by an internal reorganization of the universities. Efforts at educational policy reform had received a decisive boost from the public discourse on the “crisis of education” beginning in the late 1950s. The far-reaching educational reforms were pursued on national and state levels with the explicit aims of increasing “social equality of opportunity” and better utilizing the “educational reserves” for economic development. As a result, beginning in the 1960s, West German universities were transformed from elite institutions into educational institutions for the children of broader segments of the population. This development was promoted by the overall social reform climate of the 1960s and 1970s as well as by the student movement, which called into question not only the fossilized hierarchical structures and traditional academic culture of the West German universities, but also their role in National Socialism.63 Since the 1970s, in addition, the new women’s movement

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criticized the patriarchal structures and content of research and teaching at West German universities.64 In the framework of the expansion of the higher education system in this reform period, the number of universities, including the technical, rose from twenty-six in 1965 to fifty-one in 1989. The total number of students at the universities grew from 107,636 in 1949 to 649,112 in 1972 and reached 1,504,140 in 1989.65 The proportion of young people starting university, which had been 6 percent in 1960, rose to 30 percent in 1989.66 In the course of the expansion of the higher education system, the West German universities opened up mainly to new middle-class social strata. The proportion of children from white-collar families in particular rose steadily from 20 percent in 1950 to 38 percent in 1988. The proportion of working-class students, which had grown from 4 to 7 percent between 1950 and 1968, increased much less in subsequent years, reaching just 16 percent in 1988. Children of the self-employed, members of the liberal professions, or civil servants continued to make up the majority.67 The proportion of female students grew, too, first from the mid1950s only slowly, then more markedly starting in the 1960s. The figure was 26 percent in 1960 and reached 31 percent in 1970 and 41 percent in 1990. Two-fifths of all female students studied humanities subjects. More than male students, they continued to come mainly from moneyed and educated families. University study as a means of social mobility remained closed to young West German women from uneducated strata longer than it did for young men.68 With the growth of the number of students at West German universities, the number of university teachers rose significantly, too, above all in the 1970s. Now, more aspiring academics who hoped for a university career did not come from families of the educated middle and upper classes with a long tradition of university study, but were instead the first in their families to attend a Gymnasium, the secondary school that ended with the Abitur, the degree needed to start higher education at a university. For the age cohort of men born in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the 1970s were a time of unlimited opportunities on the university labor market.69 The expansion of the West German universities made an academic career possible for women too. While in 1960 there were just sixteen female professors at West German universities, who held 1 percent of the 2,840 professorships, their number rose to 1,414 in 1977, or 5 percent of all 25,523 professorships. After this rise, the numbers stagnated, however, until 1989 at 1,408, or 5 percent of all 27,240 professorships. This stagnation was a consequence of the economic crisis and with it the financial straits of the federal states in the 1980s, which led to spending cuts in higher education and a hir-

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ing freeze. Only the German unification in 1990 brought change. By 1995 the overall number of female professors had risen to 2,044, or 8.2 percent of all professors in reunified Germany.70 In West Germany mainly the education reforms of the 1960s and 1970s led in the context of general social change to the opening of the universities for women. The main motive for these reforms were the requirements of a changing economy that needed a better educated male and female workforce. This policy was supported by the new women’s movement’s demand for women’s equal access to education and the labor market. A similar motive, the needs of the strained labor market, drove the policy in higher education in East Germany. Here it was socialist women’s emancipation theory that supported the growing inclusion of women in higher education, mainly as students. But in both Germanies this development did not mean that the growing percentage of female students would lead to a corresponding growth of the proportion of women in academic positions in research and teaching, as the example of the historical profession shows.

The Integration of Women and Women’s History into the East German Historical Profession The development of the historical profession in the two German states reflected general trends in higher education. According to the Statistical Yearbook of the GDR, the overall number of history students rose only slightly between 1972 and 1990, from 3,133 to 3,480. Of the 3,133 students in 1972, 2,757 were studying “History and Civics” to become schoolteachers with a diploma (Diplomlehrer); of the 3,480 in 1990, the figure was 3,057; in both years an average of 88 percent. Only a very small number of students were allowed to study history itself: only 472 in 1962, 279 in 1972, 347 in 1982, and 370 in 1990.71 Unlike those who studied history with the goal of teaching in schools, where the proportion of women was disproportionately high, in this small, select group of history students with hopes of an academic career, the percentage of women most likely remained under the overall average. Unfortunately, figures exist only for the subject group “Philosophy, History, Political Science and Law.” Here, women made up 36 percent in 1971 and remained well below the average in the decade that followed, reaching only 40 percent in 1989.72 The number of doctorates in history (Dissertation A) was highest in the years 1960–64 at 237, and fell dramatically to just three in 1985–89. The number of habilitations (Dissertation B), however, rose in the same period from 56 to 121.73

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There are no official statistics on the percentage of female history professors in the GDR. The Lexikon der DDR Historiker published in 2006 by Lothar Mertens can help here. He included in this lexicon the biographies of 1,100 GDR historians, who between 1949 and 1989 defended a habilitation/Doctorate B, were appointed as a regular full professor (ordentliche Professor) or irregular professor (außerordentliche Professor), or worked in another position in the academic system of the GDR. Mertens defines the term “historian” broadly, because in the GDR, scholars who worked in neighbor disciplines like art history or ethnology were similarly labeled as such.74 Of the 1,100 historians in Mertens’s lexicon, 146, or 13 percent, are women. Of them, 55 achieved in their career the position of a regular full professor, 11 the rank of an irregular professor, 34 the rank of an instructor, 15 the rank of a senior research assistant, and 21 the rank of a research assistant. The remaining 10 had other academic positions, mostly as research associates. The major research fields of the female regular professors were the history of the national and international labor movement (twelve), non-European history (six), and the history of sciences (five). Only two worked in the field of modern German and European history; eight focused on the history of earlier periods.75 The general development of the discipline itself in the GDR has been far better studied than the gendered composition of its members. The content of research and teaching in history at the universities and the Academy of Sciences was controlled by the SED and was generally expected to follow its socialist worldview. This policy was largely implemented up to 1989. History was also an important component of the basic course in social sciences (Gesellschafts-wissenschaftliches Grundstudium) that had been obligatory for all students in the GDR since 1951. For that reason, all universities and colleges had a department of social sciences. In 1960 these were first renamed institutes, and from 1968 sections of Marxism-Leninism. These institutions organized the Marxist-Leninist training and further education that all students, research associates, doctoral candidates, and university instructors were required to undergo.76 The GDR policies to promote women in the education system and the workforce since the early 1950s, which intensified in the 1960s and 1970s, increased the proportion of women among researchers and instructors at East German universities, but mainly in mid-level positions.77 In 1961 women still made up a relatively small proportion of instructors in higher positions at GDR universities, but they were significantly better represented in the lower-level and mid-level positions than in the FRG. They comprised on average 3 percent of professors, with 8 percent in the humanities. The first female professor of history in the GDR was

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the medievalist Irmgard Höß, who earned her doctorate at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena in 1945, habilitated there in 1951, and became a professor at the University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1956. But she already fled to the West in 1958 where she was not appointed to a professorship again. Among instructors, the proportion of women in 1961 was 7 percent, among lecturers 39 percent, among senior research assistants 10 percent, among research assistants 26 percent, and among research associates 17 percent.78 This situation changed little until the late 1980s. Women’s academic careers in the GDR generally ended with a permanent position as an instructor, lecturer, or research associate on the lower or mid-level of the research and teaching hierarchy in universities, colleges, and other academic institutions, where they were subordinate to male colleagues. As a consequence, although in 1989 women made up 35 percent of all teaching staff in GDR higher education, usually in permanent positions, and 13 percent of all instructors, they still comprised only 5 percent of professors, like in the FRG.79 This situation was presumably no different in the field of history on average than in other disciplines; this is at least suggested by the figures given by Mertens. Despite all the egalitarian socialist rhetoric, women in the GDR were far from equally integrated into the academic system. This is also suggested by a look at the gender composition of GDR historians in academic leadership positions. There was only one woman among the chairs and vice-chairs of the history institutes at the GDR Academy of Sciences up to 1990, professor Helga Nussbaum, who chaired the Institute of Economic History from 1977 to 1987 and also served from 1979 to 1990 as chair of the GDR National Committee of Economic Historians. Between 1958 and 1990 not a single woman served as president of the GDR Society of Historians (Historiker-Gesellschaft der DDR). Only Annelies Laschitza, professor of contemporary history at the SED Central Committee’s (ZK) Institute of Marxism-Leninism, was one of the vice presidents from 1972 to 1990. Even the editorial board of the central historical journal Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft had no female members before 1990.80 Moreover, in the GDR, too, women’s history was recognized as a subject of research only very gradually. After the SED’s 6th Party Congress in January 1963 had passed a resolution on the “comprehensive building of socialism” and thus on the reconstruction of society, the question of how to achieve women’s emancipation was also put on the political agenda. In order to explore this question further, to analyze the situation of women in the GDR more systematically, and to prepare recommendations for scholars and politicians, that same year the ZK of the SED and the Council of Ministers of the GDR set up the academic advisory board “Woman

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in Socialist Society” together with a research group. The advisory board was attached to the GDR Academy of Sciences. Lotte Ulbricht, wife of the then-chairman of the GDR Council of State and a member of the ZK’s Women’s Commission, had insisted on this high-level affiliation in order to ensure from the outset a strong position in the academic landscape of the GDR. The classicist Werner Hartke, president of the GDR Academy of Sciences, chaired the advisory board. The jurist Anita Grandke was appointed director of the research group.81 According to a report in the 1967 Informationen. Die Frau in der sozialistischen Gesellschaft, the advisory board’s mission was to see to it that “research on women’s position” was “deliberately, systematically and methodically incorporated as a subcomplex into the study of overall societal development.”82 Women’s history was supposed to evolve into an important research field. The Study Group of the History of the Working-Class Struggle for Women’s Emancipation became a center of this research. It was headquartered at the Clara Zetkin College of Education (Pädagogischen Hochschule) in Leipzig, where its chairman Joachim Müller taught as a history professor, and encompassed twenty scholars, including two women, working at six universities, colleges, and academic institutes in the GDR.83 East German research on women’s history developed only slowly. Beginning in the early 1970s, scholars explored women’s history mainly at the SED Central Committee’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Berlin, the GDR Academy of Sciences (especially at the Central Institute of History, the Institute of Economic History, and the Central Institute of Ancient History and Archaeology), the Humboldt University in Berlin, the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, and the Karl Marx University in Leipzig.84 The research on women’s history at these institutes, with its strong Marxist-Leninist orientation, did not succeed in changing the image of history conveyed at schools and universities or to the wider public. Accordingly, in 1989 the study group was still calling in a “Declaration” published in its journal, the Mitteilungsblatt der Forschungsgemeinschaft Geschichte des Kampfes der Arbeiterklasse um die Befreiung der Frau, for a “reworking of school history curricula in the GDR from the perspective of women’s history!”85 A report on women’s history in the GDR written in 1989 on the occasion of the first conference of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH), which had been founded in 1987, reached the same conclusion. Its two authors, the leading East German women historians Petra Rantzsch and Erika Uitz, observed: “One of the basic problems is the very slow integration of the results of historical research on women into the more general historical overviews which essentially determine the layperson’s overall picture of history.”86

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The report, which was published in 1991 in the IFRWH volume Writing Women’s History, documents not just the central topics of GDR women’s history research, which focused on German history: the social situation and everyday life of women of various social strata, but especially the underclasses, in medieval, early modern, and modern history; the struggle of the labor and women’s movements to change women’s situation; and the role of women in the anti-fascist resistance. It also underlines how strongly the Marxist view of history also influenced research on women’s history in the GDR. Its authors wrote: Women’s history research in the GDR is, to a large extent, still committed to a Marxist understanding of society that sees society as a totality, of which, of course the relation of the sexes is an integral part. . . . A basic premise of Marxist women’s history research is the view that women’s issues, as social issues, must be seen as closely bound up with the entire social process such as the development of the economic structure of society and its accompanying conflicts.87

This was the classic rhetoric of the socialist women’s emancipation theory, arguing that gender equality will primarily be reached by women’s equal access to the labor force and the liberation of the working class.88 Even in 1989 Petra Rantzsch and Erika Uitz did not reflect on the extent to which their Marxist approach and the lines of inquiry shaped by it limited their analysis and interpretation and thus the perception of their scholarship beyond the GDR. Only with regard to research on women in the GDR did they concede that the research was frequently apologetic in nature and affirmative of official policy.89

The Integration of Women and Women’s History into the West German Historical Profession As in the GDR, the development of the historical profession in the FRG reflected societal and political change since 1945. Unlike in East Germany, the absolute number of history students continued to grow strongly in the West beginning in the 1970s: from 11,974 in 1972 to 19,588 in 1987. The number of doctoral candidates also rose significantly, but not to the same degree: from 217 in 1972 to 252 in 1987 and 365 in 1992.90 The total number of full-time paid teaching staff in history did not keep pace with the number of students, rising from 1,400 (including 575 professors) in 1982 to 1,917 (including 694 professors) in 1992.91 The increase in the number of students and doctoral candidates since the 1970s was accompanied by a growing inclusion of women in the

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historical profession. In 1972 women made up 38 percent of all history students and 21 percent of all history PhDs; by 1992 women’s proportion among students rose to 42 percent and among PhDs to 33 percent. The number of female historians who had completed the habilitation process was initially extremely low. No more than thirteen women habilitated in history in West Germany between 1945 and 1970.92 In contrast to the figures among students and doctoral candidates, the overall number of habilitations in history rose very slowly in the 1970s and 1980s: from thirty-six in 1982 to forty-six in 1992. In the same decade, the proportion of women increased from 4 to 17 percent.93 The growth in the proportion of women in the academic staff was much smaller. Male resistance to women in academic teaching long persisted in postwar West Germany.94 As a consequence there were only fifteen women teaching history at West German universities in 1960; they made up 5 percent of academic staff. Only four of those fifteen had the status of a habilitated Privatdozentin (instructor).95 It was not until 1964 that the first habilitated woman was appointed to a full professorship in history in West Germany. The historian of antiquity Ruth Altheim-Stiehl was offered a chair at the University of Münster in 1964. That same year, the medievalist Edith Ennen was appointed to a chair of historical Landeskunde (regional studies) in Saarbrücken. Ennen had not completed a habilitation and had previously worked as an archivist.96 By 1977 the number of female professors of history had risen to sixteen. Women thus occupied no more than 4 percent of professorships in history. In 1982 the proportion of women in the highest rank of full professors, the C4 professorships, was still 4 percent and did not rise until 1992. The development of their proportion in the lower rank, the C3 professorships, was somewhat better. Here, it rose from 4 percent in 1982 to 10 percent in 1992.97 It is striking that similar to the GDR the majority of the few female historians who were appointed to a professorship into the 1980s did not work in the fields that were perceived by their profession as the ones of greatest importance for the formulation of the national master narratives and the interpretation of recent developments—modern and contemporary German history—but in fields like ancient and medieval history, Eastern European, Western European or non-European history or in newly developing fields like early modern history or social history.98 As was the case in the GDR Society of Historians, women were long underrepresented in the West German professional organization for historians (Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, VHD).99 In the 1970s women made up 9 percent of the VHD membership; but comprised 40 percent of members of the history teachers’ organization (Verband der Geschichtslehrer). Until the most recent times, all chairs of the VHD

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were men.100 Encouraging women was not an issue of interest to the VHD and was addressed only since 2000 as part of the debate of the “Nachwuchskrise,” the crisis of the academic job market for habilitated historians who hoped to get one of the extremely rare full professorships.101 The editorial board of the venerable Historische Zeitschrift was firmly in male hands and the proportion of articles by women remained very small. Between 1950 and 1990 no more than 2–3 percent of contributions to the history journal were written by women, rising to 4 percent in the 1990s; rarer still were articles on women’s and gender history.102 These statistics illustrate the significant resistance that women had to overcome if they aspired to a career in the West German historical profession or even called for research on women. This also applied to the careers of the first four female professors who turned to this subject in West Germany: Annette Kuhn (since 1966 professor at the Bonn College of Education, later at the University of Bonn), Heide Wunder (since 1977 professor at the University of Kassel), Karin Hausen (since 1978 professor at Technical University of Berlin), and Gisela Bock (since 1989 professor at the University of Bielefeld); only the latter’s professorship had the denomination “women’s and gender history.”103 The situation in the 1970s and 1980s was even more difficult for younger women who wanted to write a dissertation or habilitation in women’s history or to teach a university seminar on a topic related to this subject. Only rarely could these pioneers count on the support of fellow male historians, but of course there were exceptions.104 The paradigm shift to social history in West German historiography that began in the late 1950s and gradually gained ground in the 1960s and 1970s did at first little to improve the integration of female historians and women’s history in the discipline. The male historians, who began to assert the new approach of social history in early modern, modern, and contemporary history, were not interested in the history of women. They often still shared the same gender bias as their more conservative colleagues in the discipline who worked in traditional fields like the history of ideas, political and military history. This changed only slowly since the 1970s, when more mainly younger male social historians were employed as professors who were willing to hire more female historians and open the field of social history to issues of family and historic demography.105 This development was supported by the growing demands of female students, active in the new women’s movement, who requested the integration of women’s history in research and teaching at universities.106 The paradigm shift to social history, fostered by growing social diversity among the academic staff, and the social reform climate of the era, was thus one important precondition for the inclusion of female histori-

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ans and women’s history in the West German historical profession. The central site for the development of social history in Germany became the Study Group on Modern Social History (Arbeitskreis für Moderne Sozialgeschichte e.V.) founded in 1957 by Werner Conze, who had a chair at the University of Heidelberg from 1957 to 1979. The membership in the Arbeitskreis was limited to twenty-five historians, and until the early 1990s all of them were men. The members, representatives of various approaches in social history, advanced its lines of inquiry, theoretical approaches, and methodologies in often controversial discussions, but none of the twenty-five worked on women’s history. At best individual female historians working on this subject were invited to the annual conferences of the Arbeitskreis in the 1970s and 1980s.107 Although the number of women among history professors, research assistants, and associates was still very small in the 1970s and 1980s, the growing number of female historians among doctoral and habilitation candidates helped transform the profession with their innovative scholarship. Most of them initially worked in social history, where they introduced new approaches and topics such as the history of the family and of women and called for an integration of the history of everyday life and oral history. Later they were among the first to welcome the “linguistic and cultural turn” and conduct research in cultural history. From the mid-1980s, women’s history expanded in this context to gender history, which understands gender as a research topic and method, and regards it as a context-specific and relational category of analysis intersected with others, such as class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. The stated aim was to “deconstruct” the master narratives of so-called general history.108 It was also at this time that the journals Feministische Studien (1982), L’Homme (1990), and Metis (1992) were founded and the Campus Verlag book series “Geschichte und Geschlechter” (History and Genders) (1992) were started. All of them were important for the development of women’s and gender history and feminist studies in West Germany.109 Despite persistent resistance, the late 1980s and early 1990s were a period of hope among West German female historians that women and women’s and gender studies would gain ground more widely in the German university system as they had in the United States. This optimism was also reflected in 1990 in the founding of the Women’s History Study Group (Arbeitskreis Historische Frauenforschung, AKHF), the German section of the IFRWH, by twenty female historians. The stated aims of the AKHF included “intensifying scholarly exchange among all those working in women’s and gender history, supporting them with a scholarly and academic policy network and establishing women’s and gender history in the academic and cultural landscape of the Federal Republic both within

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and outside the universities in the long term.” The founding of the Arbeitskreis, Lorraine Daston noted in retrospect in 2015, “was a wise attempt to acquire national visibility through international recognition on the institutional level,” to connect scholars working in the field and at the same time to improve their qualifications through a newsletter, national and regional conferences, colloquia for doctoral candidates, and summer schools.110 By 1992 the AKHF “Database of German Historians with a Research Focus on Women’s and Gender History” demonstrated how untenable the widespread argument in the West German historical profession was that there were no qualified women to hire as research associates, assistants, senior assistants, or professors at history departments, or to invite to the usually male-dominated academic conferences. The database included 280 historians, 262 women and 18 men, who had worked or were currently working on topics in women’s and gender history. Of these, 7 women and 12 men were professors. Of the 249 younger scholars, 6 were habilitated and 100 had doctorates. Twenty-three were working on a habilitation thesis and 119 on a doctoral dissertation. However, of the female doctoral candidates only 85 had the security of an institutional affiliation.111 This points to the precarious situation and difficulties that many young women still confronted in West Germany in the early 1990s if they chose to write a dissertation in the field of women’s and gender history.

The Historical Profession after German Reunification German reunification did little to change the West German trends described here. This is remarkable, considering that the proportion of women among students and doctoral candidates as well as research and teaching staff in history in mid-level positions at universities and academic institutes in the GDR had always been higher. In the wake of the Unification Treaty of 31 August 1990, West German structures were applied, with some modifications, to the higher education system in the East. The new federal states created the legal framework for this with the “Higher Education Renewal Acts.” Overall, the university landscape in the new federal states was expanded by the reorganization of higher education. The number of universities rose from nine to sixteen (including the six technical universities). As a result, Eastern universities now represented 20 percent of all 80 German universities and colleges, which was higher than the proportion of inhabitants from the new federal states within the German population (17 percent). But at the same time, the West German higher education system was simply transferred to the East.112

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Following the far-reaching institutional and personnel restructuring of the higher education landscape in the new federal states, which proceeded very differently at individual institutions, the personnel structure in the East adapted to that in the West. The evaluation for continued employment (Überprüfung zur Weiterbeschäftigung) was a dramatic experience for scholars at GDR universities and research institutes. In this process their academic qualifications and political involvement in the GDR regime were scrutinized, pending a decision on whether to keep them on. More than half of the existing positions were either abolished or filled with new people.113 This investigation and the attendant replacement of elites affected the humanities and social sciences, which were especially influenced by Marxist ideology, far more drastically than medicine, the natural sciences, or technological fields. This is in general evident from the well-studied example of Berlin’s Humboldt University (HUB). Out of 500 of the university’s GDR-era professors,134, or 27 percent, were kept on after intense political scrutiny and scholarly evaluation. The vast majority were natural scientists, with only a small number of history professors.114 But the 18 East German history professors at the HUB did comparatively well, 9 received positive evaluations, and 7, or 39 percent, stayed on. Of 23 new appointments, 15 were C4 professors (12 of them from the West) and 5 were C3 professors (4 of them from the West). The mid-level staff in history shrank as a result of the evaluations from 42 to 18; only 40 percent could keep their position. Since a relatively large number of the mid-level staff in the GDR department were women, the investigation process hit them especially hard.115 The situation after the reunification was in general challenging for GDR historians. Of the more than 1,100 East German historians listed in Lothar Mertens’s lexicon of GDR historian for the period between 1949 and 1990, only 42 were still working in their old positions in the mid1990s, mainly at the HUB. In addition, 22 were offered a place in the Integration Program for Scholars (Wissenschaftlerintegrations-Programm, WIP), which was part of the higher education renewal program for the new federal states. Seven female professors continued to work after 1990 at German universities, mainly in the fields of ancient, medieval, early modern, and non-European history.116 Reunification opened up new job opportunities above all for male historians from the West. The generation of historians who had habilitated in the late 1970s and 1980s but had not been appointed to one of the few professorships advertised in the 1980s could now hope for a tenured position in the East. For example, not one of the twenty-three newly hired professors of history at the HUB was a woman, despite applications

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from some of the most respected female professors in West Germany. The situation at other East German universities was not much better after the “reconstruction” of the 1990s.117 Overall, the early 1990s still saw an improvement in the chances of habilitated women to be appointed to a professorship in history, which was partly the result of the establishment of new professorships for women’s and gender history in the West. But the situation changed quickly since the mid-1990s, when the chances of younger historians on the labor market became increasingly limited. For many the only two ways to stay in the academic system were either a so-called project career or academic migration. More German historians than ever before since 1945 migrated and started an academic career abroad.118 Female scholars from the GDR in the social sciences and humanities, including history, seem to have been in the early 1990s among the particular losers in the reconstruction of higher education in the East. They were not just affected by the general replacement of elites in these disciplines, which was particularly extreme. They were also overwhelmingly employed in mid-level positions, which were not only cut back to the West German standard after reunification, but also were no longer tenured. When they were evaluated for continued employment, they could more rarely meet the expected qualifications, unlike their male GDR colleagues with professorships. As a consequence, the number of female GDR historians on the mid-level positions who remained in academia after reunification was even smaller than that of their male colleagues. This probably applied in particular to young women with a doctorate or habilitation (Dissertation B) who had worked in the field of women’s history in the GDR since they, like their Western colleagues, may well have also suffered disadvantages because of their research topics. The result was that only a small number of the female historians who had conducted research on women’s history in the GDR before 1990 continued to do so after reunification. This is at least suggested by the figures in the 1992 AKHF Database of German Historians with a Research Focus on Women’s and Gender History. Of the 280 historians listed, 8 came from the new federal states and twelve from East Berlin. According to the conclusions of a report on the AKHF database published in 1993 in the journal Metis, these figures reflect the difficult position of the few female historians from the GDR who tried to continue to research women’s history in the reunified Federal Republic.119 At the universities, as in other segments of society, all of the former GDR laws, projects, and initiatives favorable to women were quickly abandoned in the course of reunification. The conditions and structures were adapted to the situation in the West, where, even in the 1990s,

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motherhood and career were de facto deemed incompatible and a policy of half-day attendance prevailed in childcare, preschools, and schools. The model of the dual-earner family, which also most women and men working at universities in the former GDR had followed, did not yet enjoy broad support in western Germany in the decade after reunification.120

Conclusion Contrary to long widespread assumptions, it was not a dearth of qualified women in East or West Germany that caused disadvantages for female scholars at the universities more generally or the historical profession more specifically. In both German states, the “leaky pipeline” along the way to a professorship was large. The difficulty of combining family and a profession, which was certainly one of the reasons why fewer women decided after completing their doctorates to continue their academic careers with a habilitation, does not sufficiently explain women’s lasting disadvantages in academia, since the GDR had an extensive system of all-day kindergartens and afterschool centers and supported studying and working mothers also in other ways. Nevertheless, the careers of most academically trained women in the East ended in permanent mid-level positions. The proportion of female professors was just as small as in the FRG. Instead, all the evidence points to the prevailing male-dominated academic culture as the main reason for the persistent discrimination faced by women and also women’s and gender history. Traditional notions of what constitutes a qualified scholar and which research topics are “relevant” and of universal significance seem to be especially powerful here. These notions determine the academic habitus and research practices of a profession. Current research shows that, contrary to all the rhetoric of equality, quality and qualifications in academia were and still are measured by a male yardstick.121 This would seem to apply equally to the FRG, the GDR, and reunified Germany. Even the most recent studies show that in order to be perceived and recognized as equally qualified, women still have to achieve a good deal more than men. At the same time, their achievements are often attributed to diligence and rarely to brilliance. A study published in 2015 in the journal Science emphasizes “that across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent.” History occupies a middle position in this study, between the extremes of mathematics and philosophy on the one side and education on the other.122 Even the German Council of

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Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) had to concede in the 2012 report on its “Offensive for Equal Opportunities for Female and Male Scholars” that “the results offer no evidence for the argument that, in contrast to their male colleagues, women ‘don’t want to pursue a career’; professional success is equally important to the two sexes. However, there is evidence that skills of great significance for professional success are more frequently attributed to men than to women.”123 We have no reason to believe that this was any different between 1945 and 1990 in the FRG and GDR or afterward in reunified Germany, given the huge chasm between the rhetoric of equality and societal practice in both East and West. Karen Hagemann has been James G. Kennan Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2005. Her main fields of research are German, European, and transatlantic history, social and cultural history, the history of military and war, and women’s and gender history. Her most recent books include The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600, edited with Stefan Dudink and Sonya O. Rose (2020); Umkämpftes Gedächtnis: Die Antinapoleonischen Kriege in der deutschen Erinnerung (2019); and Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements, edited with Donna Harsch and Friederike Brühöfener (2019).

Notes I would like to thank Pamela Selwyn for her translation. 1. See, for example, Hagemann and Quataert, eds. Gendering Modern German History; idem., eds. Geschichte und Geschlechter: Revisionen der neueren deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt/M. and New York, 2008); Hagemann and Quataert, “Gendering German History,” 1–38; Hagemann and Fernández-Aceves, eds. “Gendering Trans/National Historiographies”; Hagemann, “Gleichberechtigt?,” 108–35; Hagemann and Summers, “Gender and Academic Culture,” 95–125. Next to the project “Broken Progress: Men, Women, and the Transformation of the East and West German Historical Profession since 1945,” I also initiated together with Konrad H. Jarausch a book project titled German Migrant-Historians in North America: Transatlantic Careers and Scholarship after 1945, which explores the careers and scholarship of the eighty-seven historians (29 percent of them women) who migrated since the late 1950s to North America. 2. Hausen, “Women’s History in den Vereinigten Staaten,” 347–63, 347. 3. Grandke, ed., Frau und Wissenschaft, 104, quoted in Ulrich, “Entdeckungen zur Frauenforschung in der DDR,” 148–68, 152. 4. The only study is Maul, Akademikerinnen in der Nachkriegszeit. 5. See Smith, The Gender of History; Schnicke, Die männliche Disziplin.

Contested Progress • 181 6. See Puhle, “Warum gibt es so wenige Historikerinnen?,” 364–93; Paletschek, “Ermentrude und ihre Schwestern,” 175–87; Paletschek, “Berufung und Geschlecht,” 307–52; Heike Anke Berger, Deutsche Historikerinnen; Hagemann, “Gleichberechtigt?”; Hagemann and Summers, “Gender and Academic Culture.” 7. Schaser and Schnicke, “Der lange Marsch in die Institution,” 79–110; Hagemann and Quataert, “Gendering German History”; Opitz-Belakhal, GeschlechterGeschichte. 8. See Jessen and John, eds., Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte 8 (2005): Wissenschaft und Universitäten im geteilten Deutschland der 1960er Jahre; Sabrow, Das Diktat des Konsenses; Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945; Raphael, eds., Von der Volksgeschichte zur Strukturgeschichte; Sabrow, Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte; Große Kracht, Die zankende Zunft. 9. See Berger, “Was bleibt von der Geschichtswissenschaft der DDR?” 1016–34; Röhr, Abwicklung; Fair-Schulz and Kessler, eds., East German Historians since Reunification. 10. Budde, Frauen der Intelligenz; Zachmann, Mobilisierung der Frauen; Zimmer et al., “Winners among Losers,” 30–57. 11. Allen, “The March through the Institutions,” 152–80; Bock, Pionierarbeit. 12. See Jarausch and Sabrow, eds., Die historische Meistererzählung. 13. Schaser and Schnicke, “Wege zu einer Geschlechtergeschichte der Universitäten und Geisteswissenschaften,” 27–41. 14. Bock, Pionierarbeit, 37–61. 15. On the concept, see Pierson, “Increasing Returns,” 251–67. 16. For subsequent developments, see Hagemann, “Gleichberechtigt?”; Hagemann, “Langsamer Fortschritt.” 17. Jarausch, “Universitäten in Umbrüchen,” 9–16, 11. 18. Grüttner, “German Universities under the Swastika,” 71–108; Grüttner, Studenten im Dritten Reich. 19. Jarausch, “Universitäten in Umbrüchen,” 11. 20. Oehler and Bradatsch, “Die Hochschulentwicklung nach 1945,” 412–46, 419– 25; Defrance, “Die Westallierten als Hochschuleformatoren (1945–1949): Ein Vergleich,” 35–46. 21. Jarausch, “Universitäten,” 11. 22. Ibid. 23. Miethe and Schiebel, Biografie, Bildung und Institution. 24. Wolbring, “‘Ein wirklich neuer Anfang,’” 61–75. 25. Oehler und Bradatsch, “Die Hochschulentwicklung,” 414–16. 26. Mazon, “Die erste Generation,” 113–25; Mazon, Gender, 115–51. 27. See Anger, Probleme der deutschen Universität, 451–502, 478. 28. Ibid., 491. 29. Ibid., 477 30. Ibid., 491. 31. Tietze, Datenhandbuch zur deutsche Bildungsgeschichte, 42–43 and 122, 132; see also Huerkamp, Bildungsbürgerinnen, 80–91; Huerkamp, “Geschlechtsspezifischer Numerus Clausus—Verordnung und Realität,” 325–41, 331. 32. Lundgreen, “Promotionen und Professionen,” 353–68; Mazon, Gender, 152–75.

182 • Karen Hagemann 33. Vogt, “Wissenschaftlerinnen an deutschen Universtäten (1900–1945),” 707– 29, 714; see also Häntzschel, “Zur Geschichte der Habilitation von Frauen in Deutschland,” 84–104; Paletschek, “Verschärfte Risikopassage,” 598–600. 34. See Berger, Deutsche Historikerinnen, 56–57; Paletschek, “Ermentrude,” 180. 35. Kleinen, “‘Frauenstudium’ in der Nachkriegszeit (1945–1950),” 281–300, 283–84. 36. Budde, Frauen, 94; see Moeller, Protecting Motherhood; Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make?. 37. Maul, Akademikerinnen, 273–74. 38. Mertens, “Women Students,” 113–23, 113. 39. Budde, Frauen, 93–94; Köhler, Schulen, 277, 283. 40. Lundgreen, Das Personal, 262. 41. Budde, Frauen, 83 and 93–94; Köhler, Schulen, 293. 42. John, “‘Hochschulumbau Ost,’” 155–66, 160; Köhler, Schulen, 75. 43. John, “Hochschulumbau Ost,” 157. 44. Mertens, “Women Students,” 113–14. 45. Köhler, Schulen, 283–84. 46. See Baske, “Das Hochschulwesen,” 202–28; cf. Budde, Frauen; Zachmann, Mobilisierung; Mertens, “Women Students.” 47. Köhler, Schulen, 77. 48. Ibid., 310. 49. Budde, “Gelungener Elitenwechsel?,” 150–68, 161. 50. Köhler, Schulen, 310; Lenhardt and Stock, Bildung, Bürger, Arbeitskraft, 115. 51. Mertens, “Women Students,” 117. 52. Köhler, Schulen, 293; Sigrid Metz-Göckel, “Die ‘deutsche Bildungskatastrophe’ und die Frau als Bildungsreserve,” in Geschichte, ed. Kleinau und Opitz, vol. 2, 373–85, 380–81; Budde, Frauen, 94; Geißler, Die Sozialstruktur Deutschlands, 304. 53. Anke Burkhardt and Ruth Heidi Stein, “Frauen an ostdeutschen Hochschulen vor und nach der Wende,” in Geschichte, ed. Kleinau and Opitz, vol. 2, 497–516. 54. Hagemann, “Between Ideology and Economy,” 217–60; Mattes, “Ganztagserziehung in der DDR,” 230–46. 55. Mertens, “Women Students,” 114. 56. Budde, Frauen, 165. 57. See Bönke, “Männer und Frauen sind gleichberechtigt,” 447–516. 58. Köhler, Schulen, 85. 59. See Baske, “Das Hochschulwesen.” 60. Defrance, “Die Westallierten.“ 61. Köhler, Schulen, 69–70. 62. See Oehler and Bradatsch, “Die Hochschulentwicklung,” 421; Wolbring, “‘Ein wirklich neuer Anfang.’” 63. Oehler and Bradatsch, “Die Hochschulentwicklung.” 64. Allen, “The March.” 65. Lundgreen, Berufliche Schulen, 70 and 262; Oehler and Bradatsch, “Die Hochschulentwicklung,” 415–17. 66. Ibid., 417. 67. Lundgreen, Berufliche Schulen, 83–84.

Contested Progress • 183 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

Hagemann, “Gleichberechtigt?.” See Stambolis, Leben mit und in der Geschichte, 185–246. Paletschek, “Berufung,” 317. Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik, ed. Statistische Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1962, 423–25; Statistische Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1972, 370–71; Statistische Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1982, 305; Statistische Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1989, 342–47. Köhler, Schulen, 308. Mertens, Priester der Klio oder Hofchronisten der Partei?, 73. The proportion of women is not yet explored. Mertens, Lexikon der DDR Historiker, 9. Mertens himself did not analyze his data from a gender perspective. The numbers are based on my own analysis of his lexica biographies. See Neuhäußer-Wespy, Die SED und die Historie. Maul, Akademikerinnen, 197–237 and 273–353. Budde, Frauen, 165; Maul, Akademikerinnen, 310; Mertens, Priester, 30–31. Burkhardt und Stein, “Frauen an ostdeutschen Hochschulen.” Mertens, Priester, 44–45, 46–58, 63–64, 97. Maul, Akademikerinnen, 310; Ulrich, “Entdeckungen,” 148. Informationen. Die Frau in der sozialistischen Gesellschaft 2 (1967), 35, quoted in Ulrich, “Entdeckungen,” 148. Ulrich, “Entdeckungen,” 152–53. See Petra Rantzsch and Erika Uitz, “Historical Research on Women in the German Democratic Republic,” in Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives, ed. Offen, Roach Pierson, and Rendall, 333–54, 334–35. Mitteilungsblatt der Arbeitsgemeinschaft “Geschichte des Kampfes der Arbeiterklasse um die Befreiung der Frau,” 1 (1990), quoted after: Ulrich, “Entdeckungen,” 152–53. Rantzsch and Uitz, “Historical Research,” 341. Ibid., 335. As one classic text August Bebel’s Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1879) was still discussed in the GDR. Ibid., 338. See Hagemann, “Gleichberechtigt?,” Table 1: http://www.zeithistorische-for schungen.de/1-2016/id=5333 Idem, Table 2: http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/1-2016/id=5333. Puhle, “Warum,” 371; Hagemann, “Gleichberechtigt?,” Table 1; Berger, Deutsche Historikerinnen, 56–57; Paletschek, “Berufung,” 306–14. See Hagemann, “Gleichberechtigt?,” Table 1. See the survey by Anger published in 1960s, Anger, Probleme. Puhle, “Warum,” 390. Paletschek, “Ermentrude,” 181. Hagemann, “Gleichberechtigt?,” Table 2. Berger, Deutsche Historikerinnen, 56–64. Only in 2004 the VHD was renamed the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands, thus explicitly including the female members.

184 • Karen Hagemann 100. Puhle, “Warum,” 371. 101. See Lincke and Paletschek, “Situation des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses im Fach Geschichte,” 45–56; Eckert, Hilgert, and Lindner, Die Situation des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses in der Geschichtswissenschaft. For an overview, see Blaschke and Thiel, “Frauen- Alltags-, Mentalitätsgeschichte,” 565–92. 102. Paletschek, “Ermentrude,” 184; Dagmar Feist, “Zeitschriften zur Historischen Frauenforschung: Ein internationaler Vergleich,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22, no. 1 (1996): 97–117. 103. See, for example, the autobiography by Kuhn, Ich trage einen goldenen Stern. 104. See Schaser and Schnicke, “Der lange Marsch in die Institution.” 105. See Hausen, “Familie als Gegenstand historischer Sozialwissenschaft Bemerkungen zu einer Forschungsstrategie,” 171–209; Hausen, “Historische Familienforschung,” 59–95. 106. See Allen, “The March through the Institutions”; Bock, Pionierarbeit, 37–44; Schaser and Schnicke, “Der lange Marsch in die Institution.“ 107. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, 254–65; Engelhardt, Konzepte der “Sozialgeschichte.” 108 See Ute Frevert, Heide Wunder, and Christina Vanja, “Historical Research on Women in the Federal Republic,” in Writing Women’s History, ed. Offen, Pierson, and Rendall, 291–332; Hagemann and Quataert, “Einführung”; OpitzBelakhal, Geschlechter-Geschichte. 109. For more on this, see Hagemann and Quataert, “Einführung.” 110. Lorraine Daston, “Laudatio für den Arbeitskreis Historische Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Margherita-von-Brentano-Preis,” Free University Berlin, 15 July 2015. See also Schaser, Der Arbeitskreis Historische Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung 1990 bis 2015. 111. Hagemann, “Arbeitskreis,” 90–91. 112. John, “Hochschulumbau Ost,” 160. 113. See Oehler and Bradatsch, “Die Hochschulentwicklung,” 419; Mitchell Ash, “Die Universitäten im deutschen Vereinigungsprozeß – ‘Erneuerung’ oder ‘Krisenimport,’” in idem, Mythos Humboldt, 105–35; Pasternack, “Demokratische Erneuerung”; as well as the contributions by Konrad H. Jarausch, Peer Pasternack, and Detlef Müller-Böning in Gebrochene Wissenschaftskulturen, ed. Grüttner et al., 303–77. 114. in‘t Groen, Jenseits der Utopie: Ostprofessoren, 59. 115. Konrad H. Jarausch, “Das Ringen um Erneuerung, 1985–2000,” in Geschichte der Universität, 557–690, 638, 645, and 647; see also Matschenz et al., eds., Dokumente gegen Legenden. 116. Mertens, Priester, 146; the numbers on the female professors are based on my own analysis; on the WIP, see Lange, “Zur Umsetzung des WissenschaftlerIntegrationsprogramms (WIP),” 427–49. 117. Pasternack, ed., Geisteswissenschaften in Ostdeutschland 1995, 109–25; John, “Hochschulumbau Ost.” 118. Bock, Pionierarbeit, 55–58. One of the most popular countries for an academic migration of historians was, next to Austria and Switzerland, Britain, and Canada, the United States. Of the eighty-seven historians who migrated to North

Contested Progress • 185

119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

America since the 1950s in the study that I currently conducted (see note 1), 51 percent belong to the age-cohort born in the 1950s and 1960s that were especially affected by this crisis. Hagemann, “Der Arbeitskreis Historische Frauenforschung,” 87–92, 89. Allen, “The March,” 159–64; see Burkhardt and Stein, “Frauen an ostdeutschen Hochschulen”; Kriszio, “Zur Situation von Frauen,” 146–51. See Rice, Six Steps to Gender Equality. Leslie et al., “Women in Science,” 262–65. See also Costas et al., “Geschlechtliche Normierung von Studienfächern und Karrieren im Wandel,” 23–53. Wissenschaftsrat, Fünf Jahre Offensive für Chancengleichheit von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern, 24.

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Contested Progress • 187 Häntzschel, Hiltrud. “Zur Geschichte der Habilitation von Frauen in Deutschland.” In “Bedrohlich gescheit”: Ein Jahrhundert Frauen und Wissenschaft in Bayern, edited by Hiltrud Häntzschel and Hadumod Bußmann, 84–104. Munich: Beck, 1997. Hausen, Karin. “Familie als Gegenstand historischer Sozialwissenschaft. Bemerkungen zu einer Forschungsstrategie.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1, no. 2–3 (1975): 171–209. ———. Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte: Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Munich: Beck, 1983. ———. “Women’s History in den Vereinigten Staaten,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 7, no. 3–4 (1981): 347–63. Heineman Elizabeth. What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Huerkamp, Claudia. “Geschlechtsspezifischer Numerus Clausus—Verordnung und Realität.” In Geschichte der Frauen- und Mädchenbildung, vol. 2: Vom Vormärz bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Elke Kleinau and Claudia Opitz, 325–41. Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 1996. ———. Bildungsbürgerinnen: Frauen im Studium und in akademischen Berufen 1900–1945 (Göttingen, 1996), in ’t Groen‚ Adrian. Jenseits der Utopie – Ostprofessoren der Humboldt-Universität und der Prozess der deutschen Einigung. Berlin: Metropol 2013. Jarausch, Konrad H. “Universitäten in Umbrüchen. Nachkrieg – Experiment sozialistische Hochschule – Erneuerung. Zur Einleitung.” In Geschichte der Universität unter den Linden, vol. 3: Sozialistisches Experiment und Erneuerung in der Demokratie – die Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1945–2010, edited by Konrad H. Jarausch, Matthias Middle, and Annette Vogt, 9–16. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013. Jarausch, Konrad H., and Martin Sabrow, eds. Die historische Meistererzählung: Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. Jessen, Ralph, and Jürgen John, eds. Wissenschaft und Universitäten im geteilten Deutschland der 1960er Jahre.” Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte 8 (2005). John, Jürgen. “‘Hochschulumbau Ost’: Die Transformation des alten DDR-Hochschulwesens nach 1989/90 in typologisch-vergleichender Perspektive.” Die Hochschule 2 (2027): 155–66. Kleinen, Karin. “‘Frauenstudium’ in der Nachkriegszeit (1945–1950): Die Diskussion in der britischen Besatzungszone.” Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 2 (1993): 281–300. Köhler, Helmut. Schulen und Hochschulen in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1949–1989, vol. 9: Datenhandbuch zur deutschen Bildungsgeschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. Kriszio, Marianne. “Zur Situation von Frauen an ostdeutschen Hochschulen nach der Wende am Beispiel der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.” In 27. Kongreß der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie: Gesellschaften im Umbruch, edited by Stefan Schwendtner, 146–51. Opladen: Springer, 1995.

188 • Karen Hagemann Kuhn, Annette. Ich trage einen goldenen Stern: Ein Frauenleben in Deutschland. Berlin: Aufbau, 2003. Lange, Katrin. “Zur Umsetzung des Wissenschaftler-Integrationsprogramms (WIP) unter besonderer Berücksichtung des Landes Brandenburg.” Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung 3 (1994): 427–49. Lenhardt, Gero, and Manfred Stock. Bildung, Bürger, Arbeitskraft: Schulentwicklung und Sozialstruktur in der BRD und der DDR. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. Leslie, Sarah-Jane, et al. “Women in Science: Expectations of Brilliance underlie Gender Distributions across Academic Disciplines.” Science 347 (16 January 2015), no. 6219, 262–65. Lincke, Hans-Joachim, and Sylvia Paletschek. “Situation des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses im Fach Geschichte: Berufsaussichten und Karrierestadien von Historikern und Historikerinnen an deutschen Universitäten. Ergebnisse einer Erhebung im Jahr 2002.” Jahrbuch der Historischen Forschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2002, 45–56. Munich: K.G. Saur, 2003. Lundgreen, Peter. “Promotionen und Professionen.” In Examen, Titel, Promotionen. Akademisches und staatliches Qualifikationswesen vom 13. bis 21. Jahrhundert, edited by Rainer Christoph Schwinges, 353–68. Basel: Schwabe, 2007. ———. Das Personal an den Hochschulen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1953– 2005, vol. 10: Datenhandbuch zur deutschen Bildungsgeschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. Matschenz, Ingrid, et al., eds. Dokumente gegen Legenden: Chronik der Abwicklung (. . .) des Instituts für Geschichtswissenschaften an der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Berlin: Maas Verl., 1996. Mattes, Monika. “Ganztagserziehung in der DDR: ‘Tagesschule’ und Hort in den Politiken und Diskursen der 1950er bis 1970er Jahre.” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, Suppl. 54 (2009): 230–46. Matzen Stöckert, Sigrid. “Ein Experiment am Historischen Seminar der Universität Hamburg: Frauen im Nationalsozialismus (zweisemestrige Übung).” In 70 Jahre Frauenstudium. Frauen in der Wissenschaft, edited by Kristine von Soden und Gaby Zipfel, 81–108. Cologne: Pahl Rugenstein, 1979. Maul, Bärbel. Akademikerinnen in der Nachkriegszeit: Ein Vergleich zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der DDR. Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2001. Mazon, Patricia M. “Die erste Generation von Studentinnen und die Zulassung der ‘besseren Elemente,’ 1890–1914.” In Das Geschlecht der Wissenschaften: Zur Geschichte von Akademikerinnen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Ulrike Auga et al., 113–25. Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2010. ———. Gender and the Modern Research University: The Admission to German Higher Education, 1865–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Mertens, Lothar. “Women Students in the Former GDR: A Research Note.” German Politics 2, no. 1 (1993): 113–23. ———. Lexikon der DDR Historiker: Biographien und Bibliographien zu den Geschichtswissenschaftlern aus der DDR. Munich: De Gruyter, 2006. ———. Priester der Klio oder Hofchronisten der Partei? Kollektivbiographische Analysen zur DDR-Historikerschaft. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2006. Miethe, Ingrid, and Martina Schiebel. Biografie, Bildung und Institution. Die Arbeiter-und-Bauern-Fakultäten in der DDR. Frankfurt/M.: Campus-Verlag 2008.

Contested Progress • 189 Moeller, Robert G. Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Neuhäußer-Wespy, Ulrich. Die SED und die Historie: Die Etablierung der marxistisch-leninistischen Geschichtswissenschaft der DDR in den fünfziger und sechziger Jahren. Bonn: Bouvier, 1996. Oehler, Christoph, and Christiane Bradatsch. “Die Hochschulentwicklung nach 1945.” In Handbuch der Deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, vol. 6: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, part 1: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, edited by Christoph Führ and Carl-Ludwig Furck, 412–46. Munich: Beck, 1998. Offen, Karen M., Ruth Roach Pierson, and Jane Rendall, eds. Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives. Houndmills: Palgrave, 1991. Opitz-Belakhal, Claudia. Geschlechter-Geschichte. Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2010. Paletschek, Sylvia. “Berufung und Geschlecht: Berufungswandel an bundesrepublikanischen Universitäten im 20. Jahrhundert.” In Professorinnen und Professoren gewinnen: Zur Geschichte des Berufungswesens an den Universitäten Mitteleuropas, edited by Christian Hesse and Rainer Christoph Schwinges, 307–52. Basel: Schwabe, 2012. ———. “Ermentrude und ihre Schwestern: Die ersten habilitierten Historikerinnen in Deutschland.” In Politische Gesellschaftsgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Henning Albrecht et al., 175–87. Hamburg: De Gruyter, 2006. ———. “Verschärfte Risikopassage: Ein historischer Blick auf Nutzen und Nachteil der deutschen Privatdozentur.” Forschung und Lehre 11 (2004): 598–600. Pasternack, Peer, ed. Geisteswissenschaften in Ostdeutschland 1995: Eine Inventur— Vergleichsstudie im Anschluß an die Untersuchung “Geisteswissenschaften in der DDR.” Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1996. ———. “Demokratische Erneuerung”. Eine universitätsgeschichtliche Untersuchung des ostdeutschen Hochschulumbaus 1889–1995. Mit zwei Fallstudien: Leipzig Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag, 1999. Pierson, Paul. “Increasing Returns: Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” American Political Science Review 94 (2000): 251–67. Puhle, Hans-Jürgen. “Warum gibt es so wenige Historikerinnen? Zur Situation der Frauen in der Geschichtswissenschaft.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 7, no. 3–4 (1981): 364–93. Raphael, Lutz, eds. Von der Volksgeschichte zur Strukturgeschichte: Die Anfänge der westdeutschen Sozialgeschichte 1945–1968. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2002. Rice, Curt. Six Steps to Gender Equality. Tromsø, 2014. Röhr, Werner, Abwicklung: Das Ende der Geschichtswissenschaft der DDR, 2 vols. Berlin: Edition Organon, 2011. Sabrow, Martin. Das Diktat des Konsenses: Geschichtswissenschaft in der DDR 1949– 1969. Munich: De Gruyter, 2009. ———. Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte: Große Kontroversen nach 1945. Munich: Beck, 2003. Schaser, Angelika, and Falcko Schnicke. “Wege zu einer Geschlechtergeschichte der Universitäten und Geisteswissenschaften.” In Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte 20 (2017): Geschlechtergeschichte der Universitäten und Geisteswissenschaften, 27–41.

190 • Karen Hagemann ———. “Der lange Marsch in die Institution: Zur Etablierung der Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte an westdeutschen Universitäten (1970–1990).” Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte 16 (2013): 79–110. Schaser, Angelika. Der Arbeitskreis Historische Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung 1990 bis 2015: Wissenschaftliche Professionalisierung im Netzwerk. Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 2015. Schnicke, Falko. Die männliche Disziplin: Zur Vergesellschaftung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft, 1780–1900. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015. Schulze, Winfried. Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989. Siegfried Baske. “Das Hochschulwesen.” In Handbuch der Deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, vol. 6: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, 2. part.: Deutsche Demokratische Republik und neue Bundesländer, edited by Christoph Führ und Carl-Ludwig Furck, 202–28. Munich, 1998. Smith, Bonnie G. The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik. Statistische Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1962. Berlin: Deutscher Zentralverlag, 1963. ———. Statistische Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1972. Berlin: Deutscher Zentralverlag, 1973. ———. Statistische Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1982. Berlin: Deutscher Zentralverlag, 1983. ———. Statistische Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1989, Berlin: Deutscher Zentralverlag, 1991. Stambolis, Barabara. Leben mit und in der Geschichte: Deutsche Historiker Jahrgang 1943. Essen: Klartext, 2010. Tietze, Hartmut. Datenhandbuch zur deutsche Bildungsgeschichte, vol. 1, part. 1: Das Hochschulstudium in Preußen und Deutschland, 1820–1944. Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Rupprecht, 1987. Ulrich, Renate. “Entdeckungen zur Frauenforschung in der DDR.” Die Hochschule 1 (2007): 148–68 Vogt, Annette. “Wissenschaftlerinnen an deutschen Universtäten (1900–1945): Von der Ausnahme zur Normalität.” In Examen, Titel, Promotionen. Akademisches und staatliches Qualifikationswesen vom 13. bis 21. Jahrhundert, edited by Rainer Christoph Schwinges, 707–29. Basel: Schwabe, 2007. Wissenschaftsrat. Fünf Jahre Offensive für Chancengleichheit von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern – Bestandsaufnahme und Empfehlungen. Cologne: Wissenschaftsrat, 2012. Wolbring, Barbara. “‘Ein wirklich neuer Anfang’: Öffentliche Kritik an den Universitäten und Reformforderungen in der Besatzungszeit (1945–1949).” In Zwischen Idee und Zweckorientierung. Vorbilder und Motive der Hochschulreform seit 1945, edited by Andreas Franzmann and Barbara Wolbring, 61–75. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007. Zachmann, Karin. Mobilisierung der Frauen: Technik, Geschlecht und Kalter Krieg in der DDR. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2004. Zimmer, Annette, et al. “Winners among Losers: Zur Feminisierung der deutschen Universität.” Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung 4 (2006): 30–57.

CHAPTER 8

E E E Reluctant Activists Human Rights, Cleveland’s Religious Left, and El Salvador Shelley E. Rose

This chapter is inspired by Jean Quataert’s first book, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917 (1979), and her final monograph, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (2009), published thirty years later. These two books provide insight into the range of Jean’s interests throughout her career, and in important ways they also represent my own trajectory. Jean was an amazing mentor and always encouraged me to problematize the boundaries of historical and geographic categories. I came to the PhD program at Binghamton with my head full of questions about female citizenship in the Weimar Republic—thanks to Reluctant Feminists—and became inspired by Jean’s turn to human rights as her teaching assistant in graduate school. Now I find myself in Cleveland, studying the actions of four churchwomen in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s, their relationship to the transnational system of human rights during the Cold War, and the politicized memory of their tragic murders in the Cleveland community. As one of the first historians to grapple with the global history of human rights, Jean Quataert deploys the concept of transnational as “a dynamic analytical tool that simultaneously keeps in focus local contexts and international settings” in her book Advocating Dignity.1 Moving, in Quataert’s words, “seamlessly from local through national and regional to international arena and back again,” transnational analysis allows historians to assess the impact of global institutions on individual agency. Cleveland, Ohio–based Ursuline Sister Diane Therese Pinchot is one example of an individual whose acts of protest move fluidly from local through national to transnational contexts. In 2009 Pinchot served sixty days in Alderson federal prison camp for trespassing at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC, formerly School of Americas) in

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Fort Benning, Georgia.2 Indeed, Pinchot has felt called to more than a dozen acts of protest inspired by her connection to the local story of four churchwomen entangled in the politics of human rights, the Cold War, and the Catholic Church. The catalyst for Pinchot’s actions is the story of four churchwomen caught between the global frameworks of the Catholic Church, human rights, and Cold War politics: Catholic missioners Dorothy Kazel, OSU; Jean Donovan; Ita Ford, MM; and Maura Clarke, MM.3 On 2 December 1980 these American churchwomen were raped and murdered by members of the National Guard in El Salvador—guard members who were supplied with equipment and training by the United States government. Kazel and Donovan were part of the Cleveland Latin American Mission Team (CLAM), which began sending missioners to El Salvador in the 1960s. Their murders shocked and galvanized the Catholic community in Cleveland. Their deaths came at the start of El Salvador’s brutal civil war that lasted from 1980 to 1992. Even today, Cleveland’s religious Left embraces a strong tradition of transnational activism against human rights abuses and the United States’ involvement in Latin America, including the continued operation of WHINSEC. Members of the CLAM team and later the Cleveland and national InterReligious Task Force (IRTF) assert that their acts of resistance honor and seek justice for the churchwomen as missioners carrying out the charge of the Catholic Church. They are, to modify Quataert’s phrase from her first book, reluctant activists.4 For these reluctant activists, the murders of the four churchwomen brought entangled histories of the Catholic Church, the Cold War, and the human rights system into focus. As Quataert argues in Advocating Dignity, local struggles fueled the global human rights movement and “human rights mobilizations have become a part of the very fabric of struggle for change on the local level.”5 As friends and colleagues tell and retell the story of the murders, they weave this narrative into the fabric of a community of practice on Cleveland’s Catholic Left.6 Their collective memory demonstrates that local, everyday actions are sites of negotiation for human rights and the successful leveraging of human rights language, from the churchwomen themselves to the current community leaders, is a radical act. While sisters like Pinchot reluctantly identify as activists, their actions are powerful indicators of the potential for a human rights framework to transform what many of these Catholic missioners considered part of their everyday commitment to the church and its mission into radical activism that challenged not only United States’ Cold War policies but those in El Salvador as well. Their “reluctant, yet radical” activism creates a lens into the use of human rights languages by missioners and other local agents during the Cold War.7

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This chapter builds on Quataert’s foundations, grappling with the paradox of individuals like Kazel, Donovan, and Pinchot who took radical action as part of their positionality within the global and local negotiations of human rights, global politics, and the Catholic Church. Indeed, connections between the Catholic Left and Latin America remain understudied in human rights historiography. Historian Michael Cangemi confirms this in his research on the US Catholic Left and US-Guatemalan relations in the 1970s and 1980s.8 The struggle against institutional violence and assaults on personal dignity during the Cold War became a critical site of negotiating human rights in transnational movements, especially those addressing issues in Latin America. In Cangemi’s examination of Archbishop Óscar Romero, he demonstrates that the future saint’s actions connected the church’s role in Latin America with a responsibility to “respect human dignity.”9 The post–Vatican II church had much in common with the negotiation of human rights languages centered on dignity during the Cold War. The 1960s were a decade of tremendous social and political change worldwide and the Catholic Church was part of this watershed. Church leaders initiated significant reform during the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), which took place from 1962 to 1965. Pope John XXIII announced Vatican II in 1959 and the council ultimately shaped the mission of the modern Catholic Church, encouraging dialogue with other faiths and advocating an ambitious social justice agenda. In an April 1963 encyclical, Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), John XXIII endorsed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “[The Declaration] is a solemn recognition of the personal dignity of every human being; an assertion of everyone’s right to be free to seek out the truth, to follow moral principles, discharge the duties imposed by justice, and lead a fully human life.”10 Vatican II transformed the global narratives of Catholic clergy who embraced the languages of human rights and struggled with the entanglement of communist “threats” and human rights violations/languages in Central America. Cangemi notably engages with the issue of defining the US Catholic Left, arguing that members of this community are positioned on the “Left” both politically and in relationship to the Catholic Church.11 He outlines the community of practice of the US Catholic Left as “U.S.-born Catholic men and women whose politics and faith moved to the ideological Left . . . during the mid-20th Century.”12 This description aligns with the experiences of Kazel, Donovan, and many other missioners from Cleveland who traveled to El Salvador between the 1960s and 1980s. Quataert and Lora Wildenthal note that historians are latecomers to the scholarship of human rights.13 As historians deploy human rights as a

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site for analysis in diverse geographic and institutional contexts, Jay Winter and Sandi Cooper are among those who assert that there are meaningful connections between human rights and pacifist movements. Winter argues that human rights advocacy becomes a new form of pacifism in the twentieth century, taking the torch passed from pacifist organizations generally founded at the end of the nineteenth century.14 Cooper takes this analysis further, explicitly linking human rights and peace with her 2002 essay in the Journal of Women’s History “Peace as a Human Right.”15 These connections between emerging languages of human rights and pacifism are just two of numerous definitions of peace and pacifism in world history. If human rights, as Winter contends, are a “bridge between war and peace” and “apply to all cases of social conflict, violent or not,” then historians of peace must also question basic definitions of activism and pacifism. Indeed, human rights advocacy is entangled with support for victims of violence and civil war in El Salvador. This examination of the murders of the four churchwomen and the individual actions of members of the community who became reluctant activists offers a new perspective on the category of “activism” in world history. The community of practice constructed by Cleveland’s religious Left emerged in 1964 with the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland’s response to Vatican II (1962) by sending missioners to El Salvador.16 The missioners deployed human rights language to talk about their mission work within the Catholic Church, a common language that defined their community of practice into 2021 and commemorations of the fortieth anniversary of the churchwomen’s deaths as victims of the negotiation of human rights during the Cold War.17 The mission team and commemorations of the churchwomen create sites of relatable world history, as conceptualized by historian Tiffany Trimmer.18 These sites have been carefully curated as part of everyday activism by those on the Catholic Left. Everyday and grassroots activism became a bedrock for human rights reporting and accountability during the Cold War. In “Archiving Human Rights in Latin America,” historian and sociologist Michelle Carmody examines ways in which transitional justice processes in Latin America focused on victim perspectives and demonstrates that while the legal process is temporary, the archives of curated victim experiences are permanent.19 As with Cleveland’s Catholic Left, Carmody’s analysis reveals activists’ and victims’ desire to use archives of human rights violations to build collective memory.20 In many cases these archives become an integral part of national memory. In the example of the four churchwomen, the archives maintained by the families and institutions of the churchwomen serve as spaces to build a dynamic and persistent collective memory around the “martyrs.” These archives have set a powerful context for what political

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scientists Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink describe as “symbolic politics” in transnational advocacy networks. For Keck and Sikkink, symbolic politics are “the ability to call upon symbols, actions, or stories that make sense of a situation for an audience that is frequently far away.”21 For the reluctant activists on Cleveland’s religious Left, symbolic politics are an essential tool for creating collective memory in their community of practice and continuing to raise awareness about ongoing human rights atrocities in Latin America. They commemorate the deaths of the churchwomen annually, and a key component of the annual ritual in Cleveland is to name all known victims of human rights violations in Latin America during the preceding year. In so doing, those on the religious Left bear witness and create a permanent, cumulative record for a transnational narrative of human rights abuses that does not have a clear end or closure. Commemoration events in Cleveland and acts of civil disobedience like that of Pinchot center on narratives that keep the focus on US policies in Latin America, beginning in the 1980s and carrying into the present day. Strikingly, historian Theresa Keeley finds a different tone in her analysis of the 2010 and 2011 commemoration events on the thirty-year anniversary of the murders in El Salvador and Washington, DC. Instead of a focus on US foreign policy and its effects in El Salvador, Keeley observes frustration at the Catholic Church and the place of women in the institution in El Salvador events and a focus on the Maryknoll Sisters and their actions in the Washington, DC, events.22 Keeley concludes: “These differences underscored that remembering the churchwomen was not just about one memory, but different kinds of memories for different communities.”23 I take this analysis a step further, arguing that Keeley’s findings further reveal a transnational community of practice that formed around symbolic politics and the deaths of the four churchwomen. Importantly, this community of practice is anchored in multiple locations, including Cleveland, El Salvador, and Washington, DC; as Keeley aptly notes, “ultimately, who was remembering” and, critically, where they were located “shaped how the women were commemorated.”24 The common connection remained the four churchwomen and the narrative of their deaths at the hands of US-supported forces and the continuity of human rights violations they witnessed and eventually fell victim to. This illustration created by Lee H. Miller for the national Religious Task Force on Central America demonstrates the centrality of these women in the local, national, and transnational narratives of human rights (see figure 8.1). Despite the rituals of symbolic politics, the late Cleveland Bishop Anthony Pilla asserted that partisan politics is not the realm of the church, yet Ursuline sisters who might not normally identify themselves as activists participate regularly in the IRTF activities and commemorations.25

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Figure 8.1. • Lee H. Miller, illustration for Religious Task Force on Central America pamphlet depicting Kazel, Donovan, Ford, and Clarke, 1989. Laurie S. Wiseberg & Harry Scoble Human Rights Internet Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.

These sisters are reluctant activists, and though they resist the label, their acts of civil disobedience are political acts. While explaining her “need” to get arrested, for example, Pinchot also described her reservations. “I am an introvert, this is not who I am. But it felt like this is what was supposed to happen.”26 Pinchot and her sisters are compelled to activism by the murders of Kazel and Donovan and the ongoing sense of betrayal given that their own government provided resources to the men who killed them. The continued operation of WHINSEC fuels the Ursulines’ commitment to acts of protest in memory of their tortured and slain sisters. Pinchot builds on Kazel’s legacy, which she considers a personal challenge to “speak the truth with steadfast love even in the time of war and oppression.”27 For these reluctant activists, Winter’s definition of peace as a “condition in which human rights supercede, without replacing, sovereignty” is an active struggle within the frameworks of the post–Vatican II Catholic Church.28 As members of the CLAM team, Kazel and Donovan were also reluctant activists. By advocating for impoverished communities in El Salvador, they found themselves in the middle of a partisan conflict between the Marxist-Leninist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and El Salvador’s government. In an institutional context, the churchwomen served a Catholic Church newly transformed by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. In a global context, Kazel and Donovan were on the front lines of the Cold War, and among the most prominent Western casualties of the civil war in El Salvador that lasted from 1980 until

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1992. Their legacy is complicated, not least because of their Cold War positionality and the various groups who leveraged their narratives for other purposes, even before their tragic murders. In order to understand Kazel and Donovan’s presence in El Salvador in 1980, historians must look back to the 1960s. The Cleveland Diocese began to send missioners to El Salvador in 1964 and the local order of Ursuline sisters committed two sisters to the mission every five years, beginning in 1967.29 Kazel (1939–1980), a native Clevelander born into a Lithuanian American family, was influenced by the Cold War even before her decision to join the Ursuline Order.30 She came of age in a Cleveland where Cold War politics and the arms race were woven into the landscape in the form of missile bases and migrant military personnel. In this context, Kazel’s worldview was shaped by her relationship with Don Kollenborn, a soldier from Bakersfield, California. In 1955 Cleveland became a key site in the Cold War arms race. The United States Army built seven Nike missile bases in the greater Cleveland area (and over two hundred nationwide) as part of an elaborate air defense system. Deployed in 1954, these bases were the “world’s first operational, guided, surface-to-air missile system” and a response to the perceived Cold War threat to the United States by Soviet bombers.31 The Nike bases brought the Cold War to Cleveland, and with it, soldiers from all over the United States. In 1959 Kazel became engaged to Kollenborn, who was stationed at the Nike base in nearby Willowick, Ohio.32 Despite her close relationship with Kollenborn, Kazel broke her engagement and entered the novitiate of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland on 8 September 1960.33 In 1967 Kazel was one of the first applicants to be an Ursuline member of the CLAM team. “I have a sincere love and desire to help people,” Kazel asserted in her application letter, “and for some reason the Spanish and Indian people do have a special appeal for me.”34 This “appeal,” Kazel explains elsewhere, was rooted in domestic mission work and her trips to California to visit Kollenborn’s family. Kazel’s desire to pursue mission work fit well with the broader doctrine of the Catholic Church, especially post–Vatican II. In the words of Ursuline missioner Christine Rody, after Vatican II the “Church was a world organization, out for the world.”35 Rody describes the institutional chaos in the church after the Second Vatican Council. Her own motivation to become a missioner in Latin America was to be able to teach her American students about the world, grounding them in this transitional moment in the church’s history. The reformers at Vatican II encouraged Catholics to reach out to other faiths and communities. Like Rody, Kazel began her service in El Salvador with

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the CLAM team in 1974 after spending years teaching and serving as a guidance counselor in Cleveland-area schools.36 These women embodied what it meant to be transnational: grounded in both the local context of Cleveland and El Salvador. Lay missioner Donovan (1953–1980), once described by Kazel as “really cute—a typical twenty-five-year-old kid,” was born in Westport, Connecticut.37 After earning her master’s degree in business administration at Case Western Reserve University, Donovan enrolled in a program for lay missioners with the Maryknoll Mission in New York.38 She joined Kazel and trained as her potential replacement in El Salvador in 1979. Donovan’s experiences were also entrenched in a Cold War framework. According to biographer Margaret Swedish, Donovan recognized Huey helicopters in the air over El Salvador and photographed them. Donovan informed US ambassador Robert White of the sightings, confirming that she knew the helicopters on sight because her father worked for the company that manufactured them. Despite his diplomatic position, Ambassador White did not know about the presence of the helicopters prior to their conversation. Donovan’s observations of the helicopters demonstrated that simply bearing witness and having that information be believed was itself a radical act. Donovan was not alone. Historian Theresa Keeley demonstrates other missioners bearing witness in her analysis of US politician Tip O’Neill’s reliance on the testimony of Maryknoll Sisters for information on Latin American during the Cold War.39 Ambassador White hosted Kazel, Donovan, and two other CLAM members for a dinner at his home on 1 December 1980 with intentions to discuss the helicopters and other events in El Salvador further.40 The next day, Kazel and Donovan left the ambassador’s home to do several errands, including picking up colleagues and Maryknoll Sisters Ford and Clarke at the airport in San Salvador. The four churchwomen were detained, questioned, and physically and sexually abused by members of the Salvadoran National Guard before being driven to a rural area near Santiago Nonualco and shot.41 On 3 December 1980 all four victims were found in a shallow grave in the Salvadorean countryside at the intersection of the global church, civil war, and the human rights system. As Pilla stated, officially the Catholic Church did not get involved in partisan politics. Vatican II is still controversial in the church in 2022, as it amplified the missionary message and encouraged dialogue with the global community. After Vatican II, Catholics, and missionaries in particular, often found themselves serving the poor in countries such as El Salvador—places that could be considered troubled areas. As Bishop Pilla expands in his interview, “The Church has always been in trouble areas, if we stayed out of trouble we wouldn’t be a good church.”42 Of course, the

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“church” is an institution; the individuals serving in the name of the Catholic Church were the ones who assisted the poor and oppressed. In the process, missioners acted based on their faith. They courageously fought for human dignity in the context of the Cold War when they were perceived as Communists, troublemakers, and, although reluctant, activists. El Salvador was indeed a trouble area exacerbated by Cold War tensions, though its historical context remains underexplored by historians compared to other Latin American contexts. Sister Martha Owen, Kazel’s mission partner until 1979, asserts that President Jimmy Carter’s support for human rights “was keeping people from being killed” in El Salvador.43 Despite Carter’s human rights advocacy, his administration continued to provide military aid to the government in El Salvador. Donovan noted on 17 February 1980 that Archbishop Romero wrote to President Carter urging him to withhold military aid to El Salvador.44 Romero’s voice was not new to Carter or an international audience. Every Sunday he broadcasted his Mass over the radio—perhaps his largest audience was in El Salvador. Donovan biographer Ana Carrigan quotes a missioner’s comment that “on any village street, on a Sunday morning, you could hear Romero’s voice emerging from houses and shops all over town.”45 Three days after Romero sent his letter to Carter, Kazel and Donovan joined fifteen other Catholic missioners in asking the president to cease US support for the military. In the letter, the missioners position themselves as both American citizens and people with firsthand knowledge of the conflict in El Salvador: “We appreciate our role as U.S. citizens working for the cause of peace and justice along with spreading the Gospel of Jesus in whom we believe.”46 They conclude that additional military aid will lead to “greater violence and oppression” in El Salvador. This letter, as well as the letter from Archbishop Romero, proved ineffective in the struggle to change US policy in El Salvador. Frustrated, Kazel wrote a second letter to Carter on 23 September 1980 outlining the everyday violence she witnessed herself—including the murder of a twelve-year-old girl in a remote canton simply because she was found carrying a song written in honor of a martyred priest. For Kazel, “the most appalling thing to me is that I am a North American and MY government gave them money for the ‘durable equipment’ they have so that it’s relatively easy to get into the worst cantons without much trouble and kill innocent people.”47 While grounded in the church’s mission to serve the poor, Kazel and Donovan’s mission work in remote regions would make their actions political in the context of the El Salvador conflict. Kazel regularly downplayed the risk of this intersection of church and politics, arguing that the National Guard would not target a “gringa” like her with blonde hair.48

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“I have been just called a communist . . . so what’s new, they always call us communists,” Kazel remarked in a tape-recorded message for her community in Cleveland 1979.49 North American missioners saw their work in El Salvador as part of the mission of the post–Vatican II Catholic Church. As missioners reached out to the poorest communities in El Salvador, they became advocates for the vulnerable rural population, the very population associated with the Communist FMLN. As a result, Catholic missioners were often seen as supporters of the Communist rebel groups. Kazel and other missioners were categorized as Communists not because of their own self-identity but by institutions, such as Salvadorean state agents. Archbishop Óscar Romero also faced violence and intrusive labeling as he preached regularly in his radio broadcasts about the everyday atrocities Kazel outlined in her letter to Carter. These broadcasts were one reason Romero was assassinated while celebrating Mass on 24 March 1980. Donovan and Kazel were among those who kept vigil at his coffin and gathered for his funeral in San Salvador on 30 March 1980. Despite their criticism of Carter, missioners like Sister Martha Owen felt that his advocacy for human rights kept the situation in El Salvador relatively contained. According to Owen, the day [Reagan] got elected, those fourteen families, that oligarchy in Salvador, had poolside parties with liquor flowing to celebrate that now there would be no restrictions on human rights . . . it was right after that, that our sisters were killed. It was as if permission had been given, although not officially.50

CLAM missioners were at the mercy of shifting international politics, and it cost Kazel, Donovan, Ford, and Clarke their lives. President Carter cut military and economic aid to El Salvador as a result, but Reagan and others linked the churchwomen’s mission work with politics, and aid to El Salvador resumed even before Reagan took office.51 These foreign policy decisions cemented already strong feelings that the churchwomen’s murders represented deeper structural issues driven by Cold War strategies. As noted previously in this chapter, the narrative of these human rights violations does not come to an easy conclusion. The narratives are punctuated by various events such the United Nations Report of the Truth Commission for El Salvador titled “From Madness to Hope: The 12Year War in El Salvador,” which concluded that “the state of El Salvador failed in its obligations under international human rights law to investigate the case [of the churchwomen], to bring to trial those responsible for ordering and carrying out the executions and lastly, to compensate the victims’ relatives.”52 Although the families of the churchwomen lost their own wrongful death lawsuit against General José Guillermo García

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and Colonel Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova for their role in the murders, the two military leaders were found guilty in a later case brought by three Salvadorans who were tortured during the civil war.53 Quataert researched these cases and their legal implications for Advocating Dignity and The Gendering of Human Rights in the International Systems of Law in the Twentieth Century.54 She was deeply interested in the legal complexities of pursuing justice for human rights violations, and in April 2006 she hosted Carlos Mauricio, a defendant and Salvadoran torture victim, at Binghamton University for “America and Torture in the Modern Age: A Forum.”55 Casanova and García were deported to El Salvador in 2015 and 2016. El Salvador and Cleveland have been intimately linked since 1964, when the first missioners from the diocese arrived in El Salvador. Bishop Pilla remarks that the CLAM team enjoyed wide community support in Cleveland. Indeed, even today both clergy and lay members of the Cleveland Catholic community actively support the mission in El Salvador.56 El Salvador is not only part of the regular mission work of the diocese. Many Clevelanders feel, as Sister Martha Owen does, that “the blood of Cleveland is in their [El Salvador’s] soil.”57 Cleveland missioners to El Salvador journey to the rural site near San Pedro Nonualco where Sister Diane Pinchot designed and built an altar to mark the rural grave where the bodies of the four churchwomen were exhumed on 4 December 1980. The commemoration of the four churchwomen does not end in San Pedro Nonualco; their legacy is curated in an annual commemoration hosted by the IRTF at the Beaumont School in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Here, the image of Kazel is etched in the school’s St. Angela Merici Chapel window, with the Merici quotation “You have more need to serve others than they have to be served.” The commemoration and community of practice has expanded over the years to include all activists considered as “martyrs” from Central American countries and a reading of names for martyrs of the past year. Furthermore, the IRTF activism includes a Rapid Response Network, which works to bring human rights violations to the attention of national governments and the transnational human rights community. The IRTF and the community of practice surrounding the murders of Kazel and Donovan raises questions that, while beyond the scope of this chapter, lay important groundwork for future research of this case study as relatable world history. The memory and collective curation of the narrative of the four churchwomen are key to the community of practice around the CLAM Team. This work continues in the mission of the “Memory and Resistance Coalition” events. In March 2021 a group of interdisciplinary scholars, educators, organizers, and activists met to discuss the legacy of the churchwomen and interrogate the label “activism”

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for use in both scholarship and twenty-first-century acts of resistance.58 This event, like this chapter, draws needed attention to the many spaces and vocabularies that individuals use to describe their actions, and lays the ground for future research. It is a call for deeper analysis of the vocabularies that historians and scholars use to talk about acts of protest, resistance, or action, and the issues of intrusive labeling. For historians, this example demonstrates that we need to use caution both in the archives and in our own analysis. Historians need to think critically about the presence and use of labels for individuals who defy disciplinary or political norms. Careful consideration of context and the recognition of the influence of historical and political memory on both labeling and the creation of narratives is a place to start for historians interested in both protest movements and individual acts of resistance or civil disobedience that defy traditional categories. The murders of Kazel and Donovan served as a catalyst for Catholic activism in Cleveland. Through regular reports of CLAM activities to their diocese, missioners like Kazel familiarized Cleveland’s Catholic community with the new reach of the church after Vatican II and its dynamic relationship to the concept of human rights, as well as the horrors created by conflicts in Central America during the Cold War. Kazel’s and Donovan’s deaths galvanized the community, and the memory of their sacrifice sustains local interest and advocacy for Central America and against human rights violations across the globe. Their legacy brings two areas for future research into sharp relief: first, the paradox of individuals compelled to activism by their commitment to human rights and dignity for all, yet reluctant to politicize their actions as protest. Second, historians must grapple with Wildenthal and Quataert’s assessment, as outlined in The Routledge History of Human Rights, that human rights narratives are not always set to resolve positively, if they are resolved at all. This chapter demonstrates that the story of the four churchwomen is still unresolved. Their community of practice in Cleveland, centered on the Ursuline sisters and the IRTF, grounds the collective memory in celebration of their lives and their advocacy for human dignity while remaining critical of the institutions that continue to violate human rights. As Quataert argues in Advocating Dignity, “the human rights movement has become global because its struggles are local.”59 Friends, family, and colleagues of Kazel and Donovan in Cleveland are committed to preserving the memory of these women, not only because they were important on a local level but also because their lives represent the negotiation of human rights on the national and transnational levels. As happened in the case of larger-than-life human rights victims like Archbishop Óscar Romero, it would have been easy for the narrative of the churchwomen

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to focus on individual heroism and acts of resistance. Yet their stories are deeply intertwined with their historical context. Donovan and Kazel, for example, accompanied Romero’s body in the funeral procession and were among those to stand guard over his coffin.60 Donovan recorded in her diary, “Funeral of Mons. Romero was disrupted by bombs and gunfire . . . more than thirty people were killed. Mass was stopped.”61 These stark lines represent the lived experience of human rights atrocities in El Salvador as part of a continuity punctuated by events such as the deaths of Romero and the churchwomen. The case of the churchwomen is an everyday story and brings the issue of ongoing accountability for the human rights in this case to the forefront. They are part of this narrative of human rights violations—not as an endpoint but as an amplifier of the situation in 1980 at the brink of civil war in El Salvador that continues to resonate in the present. Many of the sisters interviewed in the “Protest Voices” collection attempt to direct attention away from their own individual acts of protest to the memory of the “martyrs.” In Sister Diane Pinchot’s case, they try in vain. These individuals are indeed reluctant activists as they find their acts redefined to fit political structures framed by others. Regardless of their oral and written assertions about the relationship between the Catholic Church and politics, the Ursuline sisters and the Cleveland Catholic community are caught up in politics and remain so today. These reluctant activists are located at the intersection of Vatican II’s endorsement of the human rights system and Cold War tensions. They are also their own agents, navigating personal and political spaces between their faith and politics; Cleveland and El Salvador. As Quataert asserted in Advocating Dignity, transnational methods, both in organizing and analysis, must focus on both the local and international contexts. The continued narrative and symbolic politics in the community of practice inspired by the deaths of Kazel, Donovan, Ford, and Clarke are testament to this balancing act. Their narrative is ongoing, and these reluctant activists believed, and continue to believe, that their individual local acts of compassion and protest make a difference, whether they are in Cleveland or El Salvador.

Shelley E. Rose is an associate professor of history and women’s & gender studies at Cleveland State University. She received her PhD from Binghamton University in 2010 where she was mentored by Jean Quataert. Her research focuses on digital humanities, protest, and gender history. Recent articles include “Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! and the Gender of German Pacifism,” in Women Writing War; “Place and Politics at the Frankfurt Paulskirche,” in the Journal of Urban History; and

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“Connecting Vocabularies: The Cleveland Teaching Collaborative and a Humanizing Approach to Resource Curation,” with Molly BuckleyMarudas. Rose leads the Cleveland Teaching Collaborative and the Gender Studies Resources digital humanities projects.

Notes I would like to thank Julia Trumpold and Michael Cangemi for their insightful readings of this chapter, as well as the anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful to Naomi Randt for her excellent work on the “Protest Voices” oral history project and for connecting me to the narrative of the four churchwomen. 1. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 7. 2. “Diane Therese Pinchot interview,” 9 August 2016, interview by Naomi Randt, Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection, Interview 750012, http://engaged scholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/773. See also Diane Therese Pinchot, “Art Advocacy - Social Justice,” Personal Website Diane Therese Pinchot, osu, mfa, accessed 1 September 2017, http://web.archive.org/web/20190330123528/ http://www.dianetheresepinchot.com/art-advocacy---social-justice.html. 3. OSU is the abbreviation for the Ursuline Sisters and MM is the abbreviation for the Maryknoll Sisters. 4. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, xi. 5. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 6. 6. I have written about activist communities of practice elsewhere in Rose, “Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen Nieder! and the Gender of German Pacifism,” in Women Writing War: From German Colonialism through World War I, edited by Katharina von Hammerstein, Julie Shoults, and Barbara Kosta (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2018), 143–61. I draw on Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s definition from sociolinguistics. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, “Think Practically and Look Locally,” 464. 7. Quataert describes this paradox in Reluctant Feminists, xii. 8. Cangemi, “‘They Are the Poor, Crying Out for Justice,’” 9. 9. Cangemi, “Saint Óscar Romero, Liberation Theology, and Human Rights in El Salvador,” 8. 10. “Pacem in Terris (April, 11 1963) | John XXIII,” accessed 6 September 2017, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii _enc_11041963_pacem.html, paragraph 144. 11. Cangemi, “‘They Are the Poor, Crying Out for Justice,’” 6. 12. Cangemi, “‘They Are the Poor, Crying Out for Justice,’” 7–8. 13. Jean H. Quataert and Lora Wildenthal, “Introduction,” in Routledge History of Human Rights, 3. 14. Winter, “Imagining Peace in Twentieth-Century Europe,” 417. 15. Cooper, “Peace as a Human Right,” 9–25. 16. “Cleveland Latin American Mission,” Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, accessed 24 July 2020, https://www.dioceseofcleveland.org/offices/mission-office/cleve land-latin-american-mission.

Reluctant Activists • 205 17. “Memory and Resistance Coalition,” InterReligious Task Force Cleveland, accessed 21 April 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210310010625/ https://memoryandresistance.squarespace.com/. 18. Tiffany Trimmer, “Relatable World History: Local-Global Migration Histories of La Crosse, Wisconsin, the Malay Peninsula, and Barbados (ca 1620s–1930s),” World History Connected, accessed 27 October 2021, https://worldhistorycon nected.press.uillinois.edu/15.3/trimmer.html. 19. Michelle Carmody, “Archiving Human Rights in Latin America,” in Routledge History of Human Rights, 603. 20. Carmody, “Archiving Human Rights in Latin America,” 611. 21. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, 16. 22. Keeley, “Thirty Years Later,” 120. 23. Keeley, “Thirty Years Later,” 120. 24. Keeley, “Thirty Years Later,” 120. 25. “Anthony Pilla interview,” 4 August 2016, interview by Naomi Randt, Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection, interview 750010, accessed 28 August 2017, http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/786. “About Us,” Interreligious Task Force on Central America, accessed 1 September 2017, https://www .irtfcleveland.org/content/about-us. Saint Óscar Romero attempted to explicitly separate the church from politics as well. See Cangemi, “Saint Óscar Romero, Liberation Theology, and Human Rights,” 8. 26. “Diane Therese Pinchot interview,” 9 August 2016, interview by Naomi Randt, Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection, interview 750012, http://engaged scholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/773. 27. Diane Therese Pinchot, “Art Advocacy - Social Justice,” Personal Website Diane Therese Pinchot, osu, mfa, accessed 1 September 2017, http://web.archive .org/web/20190330123528/http://www.dianetheresepinchot.com/art-advo cacy---social-justice.html. 28. Winter, “Imagining Peace in Twentieth-Century Europe,” 421. 29. Glavac, In the Fullness of Life, 50. 30. Glavac, In the Fullness of Life, 26–27. 31. John C. Lonnquest and David F. Winkler, “To Defend and Deter: The Legacy of the United States Cold War Missile Program,” Department of Defense Legacy Resource Management Program, Cold War Project. 165. 32. Glavac, In the Fullness of Life, 37. 33. Glavac, In the Fullness of Life, 41. 34. Letter from Dorothy Kazel to Mother Annunciata, November 4, 1967. Qtd in Kazel, Alleluia Woman, 14. 35. “Christine Rody interview,” 30 July 2016, interviewed by Naomi Randt, Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection, interview 750009, accessed 31 August 2017, http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/772. 36. Glavac, In the Fullness of Life, 54. 37. Cynthia Glavac, “Dorothy Kazel, O.S.U.: ‘An Alleluia from Head to Foot,’” in Glavac, ed., In Love, in Faith, in Solidarity: Dorothy, Jean Carla, Ita, and Maura, 8. Hereafter cited as Glavac, “Kazel.” 38. Margaret Swedish, “Jean Donovan: ‘Except for the Children,’” in Glavac, ed., In Love, in Faith, in Solidarity, 15–17. Hereafter cited as Swedish, “Donovan.”

206 • Shelley E. Rose 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

Keeley, “Reagan’s Real Catholics vs. Tip O’Neill’s Maryknoll Nuns,” 530–58. Swedish, “Donovan,” 19–20. Glavac, In the Fullness of Life, 102–6. “Anthony Pilla interview,” 4 August 2016. “Sister Martha Owen interview,” 8 July 2016, interview by Naomi Randt, Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection, interview 750003, accessed 28 August 2017, http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/765. Jean Donovan, Entry on February 17, 1980, Personal Diary, Jean Donovan Papers, COAR Peace Mission, Wickliffe, Ohio. Carrigan, Salvador Witness, 119. Letter to President of the United States of America Mr. Jimmy Carter, February 20, 1980. Box 27E, Ursuline College Archives, Pepper Pike, OH. Dorothy Chapon Kazel and Sr. Mary Ann Flannery, S.C., The Voice: A Missionary’s Call to Give Her Life (Cleveland, OH: Xulon Press, 2008), 108-109. Glavac, In the Fullness of Life, 95. Dorothy Kazel, Tape 32, February 1972. Ursuline College Archives. Pepper Pike, OH. “Sister Martha Owen interview,” 8 July 2016. Keeley, “Thirty Years Later,” 120–21, 125. United Nations, Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El Salvador, 1993. Glavac, In the Fullness of Life (2019), 215–19. Quataert, Gendering of Human Rights. Jean Quataert, “Curriculum Vitae,” 2019, https://www.binghamton.edu/history/docs/cv/profquat.cv.pdf. For example, José Solá, “Guest Post on El Salvador | Social Studies @ CSU,” Social Studies @ CSU, accessed 6 September 2017, http://socialstudies.cleve landhistory.org/2016/11/05/sola-elsalvador/. “Sister Martha Owen interview,” 8 July 2016. Memory and Resistance Coalition, “Activism: An Interdisciplinary Conversation,” EngagedScholarship at CSU, accessed 31 March 2021, https://en gagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/activismconversation/. Notably, Jean Quataert attended this event, which is a testament to her continued linkage of activism and scholarship. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 6. Carrigan, Salvador Witness, 158–62. Jean Donovan, “Domingo 30 Marzo 1980,” Diary, Jean Donovan Collection, Community Oscar Arnulfo Romero (COAR), Center for Pastoral Leadership, Diocese of Cleveland, Wickliffe, OH.

Bibliography Cangemi, Michael J. “‘They Are the Poor, Crying out for Justice’: The U.S. Catholic Left and U.S.-Guatemalan Relations, 1976-1985.” PhD dissertation, Binghamton University, State University of New York, 2013.

Reluctant Activists • 207 ———. “Saint Óscar Romero, Liberation Theology, and Human Rights in El Salvador.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Carrigan, Ana. Salvador Witness: The Life and Calling of Jean Donovan. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Cooper, Sandi E. “Peace as a Human Right: The Invasion of Women into the World of High International Politics.” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 2 (2002): 9–25. Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. “Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice.”  Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 461–88. Glavac, Cynthia O.S.U. In the Fullness of Life: A Biography of Dorothy Kazel, O.S.U. Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1996. ———. In the Fullness of Life: A Biography of Dorothy Kazel, O.S.U. 2nd ed. Pepper Pike, OH: Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland, 2019. Glavac, Cynthia O.S.U., ed. In Love, in Faith, in Solidarity: Dorothy, Jean Carla, Ita, and Maura. Cleveland, OH: Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland, 2015. Hammerstein, Katharina von, Julie Shoults, and Barbara Kosta. Women Writing War: From German Colonialism through World War I. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2018. Kazel, Dorothy Chapon. Alleluia Woman: Dorothy Kazel, O.S.U. Cleveland, OH: Chapel Publications, 1987. Kazel, Dorothy Chapon, and Sr. Mary Ann Flannery, S.C., The Voice: A Missionary’s Call to Give Her Life. Cleveland, OH: Xulon Press, 2008. Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Keeley, Theresa. “Reagan’s Real Catholics vs. Tip O’Neill’s Maryknoll Nuns: Gender, Intra-Catholic Conflict, and the Contras.” Diplomatic History 40, no. 3 (2016): 530–58. ———. “Thirty Years Later: Remembering the U.S. Churchwomen in El Salvador and the United States.” U.S. Catholic Historian 38, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 119–44. Quataert, Jean. Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. ———. The Gendering of Human Rights in the International Systems of Law in the Twentieth Century. American Historical Association Series in Global and Comparative History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Quataert, Jean H., and Lora Wildenthal. Routledge History of Human Rights. London: Routledge, 2019. Trimmer, Tiffany. “Relatable World History: Local-Global Migration Histories of La Crosse, Wisconsin, the Malay Peninsula, and Barbados (ca 1620s–1930s).” World History Connected. Accessed October 27, 2021. https://worldhistorycon nected.press.uillinois.edu/15.3/trimmer.html. Winter, Jay. “Imagining Peace in Twentieth-Century Europe.” Contemporary European History 17, no. 3 (2008): 413–22.

CHAPTER 9

E E E How Do People Use Human Rights, and What Happens When They Do? A Conversation with Jean H. Quataert Lora Wildenthal

I will begin this chapter with a personal note: ever since I read her work in graduate school in the late 1980s, Jean Quataert’s combination of political commitment and rigor helped shaped my sense of what writing history can do in the world. I first met Jean at a conference in 1990, and over the following years, we shared interests in gender, nationalism, and colonialism, then in the history of human rights. That theme led us to work together directly, coediting The Routledge History of Human Rights (2020).1 Sitting at the breakfast table in Houston reviewing contributions and cowriting the introduction, we argued nonstop and yet never disagreed. Those who knew her will understand what I mean! We will never forget Jean’s voice—neither its sound nor the passionate integrity that drove it. Jean Quataert was a historian of gender, human rights, and international humanitarian law and charity; the global history of women; and, in the early part of her career, of gender, socialist politics, and labor in nineteenth-century Germany. Her publications and collaborations (especially as coeditor of the Journal of Women’s History) have made her well known to scholars in all those fields.2 Jean’s award-winning teaching has left a rich legacy among her undergraduates and graduate students in history and other disciplines. Her impact has been felt well beyond the United States, including among a considerable number of Turkish scholars who trained at Binghamton University, where Jean was a professor from 1986 to 2020. For roughly a decade before that, she was a faculty member in the then-new women’s studies program of University of Houston-Clear Lake. Scholarship was not a solitary pursuit for Jean. She created and sustained many forums for discussion—by way of journal editing, conferences, edited volumes, activist gatherings, and also together with her spouse and lifelong intellectual collaborator, Donald Quataert,

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the preeminent social historian of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vital to Jean was the interplay among research, teaching, presenting work to academic and nonacademic audiences, and her own activism. That emerges clearly in her words, here and elsewhere. This chapter situates one of her key concepts, gender, in the field of human rights. It will then trace her overarching priorities as a scholar-activist by way of some key publications and her own reflections. The couple of years of collaboration on our volume brought me many conversations with Jean, conversations that showed her collegiality and her passion for discussing history, politics, and for teaching in the broadest sense. I wanted to resume those conversations for the present volume, focusing this time on the priorities and experiences that she discerns in retrospect as having shaped her career. She agreed, and that new round of conversation forms the basis for the latter part of this chapter. It was already clear at the outset that her priorities were, first and foremost, people, in all their variety and their inherent value. She was driven to capture their voices and experiences for the sake of a more democratic historical memory. To do that, she took seriously institutions, for it is the power of institutions that on the one hand produces silences, and it is the mutability of institutions that on the other hand creates lasting change. Institutions’ effects emerge over time and are often ambiguous. Historical research is therefore necessary for perceiving those effects and for challenging the structural oppressions that institutions reproduce. Complexity is characteristic of her work. While the injustices at issue may be crass, Jean asked complex questions and produced differentiated answers that are grounded in extensive archival evidence. These answers lead the reader down new paths of inquiry. Later, transnational connections became characteristic of her work, as her questions took her from German socialist and labor history to global history to human rights and to military history—each examined particularly through the lens of gender. Women and gender were consistent themes through all of her work. This was due not only to her political commitments but also to her first experiences with archival research while writing her master’s thesis. Reading primary sources on the German Revolution after World War I revealed to her that the published scholarship had elided the obvious prominence of women and feminist demands.3 Women’s voices, taken seriously in their own time, did not make it into the scholarly accounts that claimed to present and analyze the origins of the Weimar Republic. Jean immediately grasped the imperative of questioning existing historical narratives, in particular about voices not heard, and brought this imperative to all her research. After publishing her first book, on German socialist women

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in the years before World War I, she turned to a collaborative project situating women’s and gender history in the writing and teaching of world history, and then to a series of major articles on gender and labor, published in the 1980s, that helped define the debate on protoindustrialization.4 These articles again showed the power of detailed archival research to overturn received narratives, in this case about gender in the work process of weaving families and the inevitability of proletarianization. In the context of the Gulf War of 1990–91, Jean began to explore why and how people identify publicly with militaristic solutions, even as they know privately that those wars will hurt them. Her 2001 book Staging Philanthropy came out of a collaboration with Roger Chickering and Stig Förster on a volume of essays on total war. Staging Philanthropy investigated the aristocratic-led, middle-class, and conservative Patriotic Women’s Leagues (Vaterländische Frauenvereine) of Germany, from the Napoleonic Wars into World War I.5 After unification in 1871, these were the largest women’s organizations in Germany by far, with some eight hundred thousand members—yet scholars had ignored them. These Leagues produced a new form of gendered, dynastic nationalism expressed through philanthropic and volunteer activity, especially in the area of nursing and related services for the German military. In so doing, they recast political legitimacy and participation in the post-Napoleonic dynastic states, helping to relegitimize royalty and nobility. Their voluntarism became connected to the state-building project of a now supposedly caring state. Archivally detailed and theorized in terms of state-building, the public sphere, and cultural performance, Staging Philanthropy was—in Jean’s view—her best book. She noted, “We need to see the complexities of women’s politics. Women could favor a duty to nation and state. To neglect this material is part of not seeing why war continues.” Jean recalled: “Previously, my historical research had focused on prosopography of socialist women and on homeweaving and protoindustrialization in the Oberlausitz region. My book Staging Philanthropy was a big change for me: I went from labor to dynastic ritual! My sources were rituals and monuments. I was inspired by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities—that book had a major impact on me. I also read other work on nationalism at that time—George Mosse’s Nationalism and Sexuality of course—and really noticed these works’ focus on men.6 I wanted to understand nationalism through gender. The Red Cross used philanthropy as a political tool, and was an important forum for dynastic nationalism.” The subject of nursing led Jean both to nurses’ very diverse voices and experiences, which have always outrun the gendered ideology surrounding nursing, and to the history of the Red Cross and international humanitarian law.

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“Staging Philanthropy revealed the Red Cross’s patriotic organizations to me. Then I turned to the history of the Geneva Conventions, and from there I turned to writing Advocating Dignity.” A two-year leave with a major grant provided the opportunity to move into this field: “I spent it doing lots of intense reading in the field of human rights and also archival research on human rights: specifically, the Geneva Convention.” By the time Staging Philanthropy appeared, the era after 11 September 2001 and the war on terror had begun. Her research and writing have been primarily transnational in theme and scope ever since, tracing gender in international humanitarian law (also known as the laws of war) and in human rights.7 Her work is an excellent lens through which to observe the impact that the study of women and gender has made in conceptualizations of global human rights struggles. The next section will provide a brief account of the effects of feminist approaches to human rights, and then turns to Jean’s own voice regarding her activist and research trajectory.

Women, Gender, and Feminism in Human Rights The prescriptive, intentionally timeless-sounding claims of human rights can lead people to believe that human rights are unchanging. However, historians of human rights have shown that human rights do not comprise a stable set of either norms or interpretations. It makes a big difference when and where one inquires into human rights norms, claims made in relation to those norms, and institutions charged with those norms’ execution. As Charlotte Bunch has noted, “the dominant definitions of human rights and the mechanisms to enforce them in the world today are ones that pertain primarily to the types of violation that the men who first articulated the concept most feared.”8 While the patriarchy to which Bunch refers could pertain to any era, Bunch is speaking here of the United Nations–related formulations of human rights elaborated between World War II and the 1990s. Over that period, historically specific notions developed of, for example, the refugee and the torture victim. The normative refugee or victim of state violence was the politically active, ideologically sophisticated dissenter resisting dictatorship—an individual who was by definition articulate, personally brave, and also relatively rare.9 It is not that women were not among that group. A number of women who are still too little known in and out of their home countries, such as Asma Jahangir of Pakistan and Lina Ben Mhenni of Tunisia, fit those criteria well.10 Nor have women been the only ones to be excluded from these historically specifically norms. The so-called economic refugee served to throw into relief the deservingness of the political refugee, as

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the ordinary criminal experiencing violence in prison (itself long seen as a place where one gave up one’s rights) threw into relief the deservingness of the torture victim. These historical processes of the conceptual elaboration of human rights have resulted in the systematic—because conceptually driven—silencing of voices in the historical record. The main impact of feminist critiques of human rights has been to recast the question of what human rights violations should gain our attention and why. Yes, human rights are for the rare nonconformists who exemplify widely admired qualities (e.g., the vocal defense of a freedom; strong religious faith) as they buck oppressive political authority. However, they are also for masses of people affected by pervasive forms of oppression.11 Neither personal heroic resistance nor the sophisticated articulation of one’s position in ideological debates need be litmus tests. The key shift in perspective here is not only to ask who fits into an existing human rights mold of having experienced state-mandated, intentional abuse, but also to ask in a more open-ended fashion: What are the harms that are affecting people the most? Hunger, poverty, ill health, domestic violence—these are dehumanizing realities for vast numbers of people on this earth. This feminist shift in perspective is accomplished primarily by questioning the normative distinction between the public and private realms and between state acts of commission and acts of omission. This shift in perspective has directed attention to outcomes, which as criteria of success have since been institutionalized in various settings by way of the now widely recognized concept of “gender mainstreaming,” that is, including the documentable or potential impact on girls or women in the process of examining an existing or proposed measure. Human rights violations, thus recast, can be seen to affect very large groups. These recast notions of human rights direct our attention to violations that affect women. Why is that? “Women,” though a very large category without a great deal of sociological coherence, remains a politically meaningful category due to the fact that across the globe women and their labor are “made cheap,” in Cynthia Enloe’s phrase.12 The undervaluing of people who are women, and of what those people typically produce, leads to patterns of inequity and tension that continue to render “women” a meaningful category. These recast human rights violations also affect smaller groups who are not accorded respect (e.g., trans people). This is because these patterns extend to people who take on feminized work or to whom feminine qualities are attributed, also by way of the gendered nature of various racisms. Gender is everywhere—and yet the patterns and range of gender disparity can take time to emerge into wide public view. At the time of writing, gender issues that have finally gained wider public scrutiny include whether sexual orientation and gen-

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der identity can be encompassed by the concept of sex discrimination; sentencing disparities between male and female partners convicted of dealing drugs, which reveal that women tend in effect to be penalized for being victims of domestic violence; and sentencing disparities between men and women who claim self-defense when killing another person. It has emerged that states’ stand your ground laws do not serve women well when they claim rape or domestic violence, even when that rape or domestic violence has been legally recognized.13 The shift in perspective opened up by feminist critique of human rights has meant listening to the voices of broad masses of ordinary people, including the voices of people who do not enjoy respect as heroes. This shift has been, and remains, intensely controversial among human rights advocates. One variety of that critique has highlighted the facts that previously excluded voices may not speak in mutually intelligible ways about wrongs, and that efforts at communication do not take place on a level playing field.14 These scholars’ works reflect the reality that international human rights are now unthinkable without gender, but also that gender now shares with human rights the peril of being instrumentalized by states to build states’—not people’s—power. Let us turn now to Jean Quataert’s work in the history of human rights to show how she has engaged these issues. Her long-standing concern was to show the formative role of activism in confronting power and changing knowledge.

“Advocating Dignity”: Jean Quataert’s Scholarship on Human Rights and Humanitarianism How did Jean come to take up the subject matter of human rights in her teaching and research? “For me, it was war. The wars in the 1990s—the initial Yugoslavian wars, Rwanda, and then back to Yugoslavia with Kosovo.” Jean’s publications related to human rights fall into two main groups: first, collaborative and teaching-oriented work on human rights broadly conceived; and second, archival research on international humanitarian law, including its aspects of women’s nationalist and transnational organizing, gendered voluntarism, military nursing, and the evolution of war since the late eighteenth century. Both belong in a larger cluster of her concerns regarding peace politics, popular mobilizations, the militarization of societies, transnational and global history, and large-scale change in world history. From ca. 2000, she researched and published in both areas. She noted: “In 2000, I finished Staging Philanthropy, and when I started thinking about researching and teaching human rights, I wanted to

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focus on the gendering of human rights, just as I had worked on the gendering of nationalism.” To the first main group belong Jean’s 2009 single-authored book Advocating Dignity as well as our coedited volume The Routledge History of Human Rights. Advocating Dignity is a history of human rights advocacy that draws on her own archival research.15 Unusually for Jean, Advocating Dignity concerns the post-1945 era only; elsewhere she prefers to draw attention to the long nineteenth century as the crucible for the issues such as gender, nationalism, imperialism, and humanitarianism that shaped the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Here, however, the United Nations (UN) provides the institutional framework, and after introducing the emergence of the UN and debates surrounding it and other institutions, she turns to conceptual chapters with illustrative examples on women’s human rights; on development, social, economic, and migrants’ rights; and on ethnicized wars and humanitarian interventions, in addition to case studies of human rights mobilizations. Most of these are classics in the history of human rights: the anti-apartheid campaign; Soviet dissidents; and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo protests against disappearances in the Argentine “dirty war.” One is not: an illuminating chapter on the underresearched 2001 “World Conference against Racism” in Durban, South Africa. The media reported this conference primarily by way of attendees’ statements defining Zionism as racism and calls for reparations for slavery and colonialism, which led the U.S. and Israeli representatives to walk out; then the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 overshadowed the conference. Jean places the conference in its larger context of proposals for redress or reparations. Broad participation was formative: preparation for the Durban conference entailed a long series of regional meetings to send diverse local concerns “funneling upward.”16 These meetings showed that state-defined and even NGO-defined narratives can be challenged by individuals’ stories. The ramifications of putting such stories on record in such sessions cannot be predicted or delimited; simply the act of speaking about one’s experiences has “spiraling effects” even where there is no tangible result in the short term.17 Advocating Dignity reflects Jean’s course at Binghamton on the history of human rights, which was driven by student demand. She recalls: “I taught human rights before I ever researched it as a project. I started teaching a course in spring 2000 that was called ‘Human Rights in the 20th Century,’ on norms, ideals, philosophy, the laws of war—and how people used them. Students were very interested. We started class often by talking about a current event—a hurricane, anything—and then talking about the human rights implications, or what our understanding of the events is

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through a human rights lens. What changes? We read Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and we read Bhikhu Parekh on non-ethnocentric universalism.18 Student enthusiasm for human rights was strong, and I taught the course for two decades. It was a 300-level discussion-based class—with 70 students, but we did it! Demand was strong—I could have had 150 or 200 students in the course. But with 70 we could still discuss. Students drove the course and helped transform it. They pushed me to explain why there was so little accountability. That requires putting human rights into geopolitical context. Over time, they asked more and more penetrating questions, about how to understand the limitations of human rights.” At its time of publication, Advocating Dignity was one of the few publications that brought a historian’s disciplinary self-consciousness to the subject matter of human rights. It is important that Jean came to this synthesis well versed in the history of socialism and labor history, because the twentieth-century international human rights movement came to be institutionalized in interaction with socialist traditions and communist states, and Western formulations of human rights (e.g., the European Convention on Human Rights) were developed in rivalry with those traditions and states. Jean’s historical knowledge of workers’ experiences and rights makes vivid this book’s account of the particular human rights challenges of workers who move—and sometimes litigate— across borders. The same goes for gender. The concept of gender works so well in Advocating Dignity not simply because the reader can turn to a chapter “on” gender (although there is one), but because gender and women appear as analytical criteria throughout, as for instance in the chapter on development, social, economic, and migrants’ rights. Norms, institutions, activism, and intercultural contact are woven together in the chapter on gender, making the material come alive. For example, Jean traces the emergence of a new concept of development in the 1970s that rejected economic growth as the main index of human well-being, and how, ironically, this insight within the development community came to be accompanied by the neoliberal era of structural adjustment plans in the 1970s and 1980s. She describes the gender-specific consequences of the rollback of the welfare state in poorer countries, and links structural adjustment plans to the ensuing increases in labor migration, especially by women, that have characterized our global economy ever since. In another example of weaving gender into the material, she notes how women’s participation led to major institutional change in the way that human rights politics in general gets done: the UN’s “Decade for Women” conferences pioneered the “NGO forum” format, in which individuals and NGOs who would otherwise have no voice at a UN conference make presentations at a parallel assembly. These days, tens of thousands of in-

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dividuals and NGOs attend such parallel gatherings, which are at least as much “must-see” events as the official conferences. The main goal of Advocating Dignity is to spotlight individual activists and NGOs—to highlight the impact of ordinary people who participate in human rights debates, whether at “people’s tribunals” and NGO forums at the big UN conferences, as litigants before international courts, or in the everyday spaces where they live. Jean demonstrates how popular participation has challenged bureaucratic orthodoxies and put pressure on narrow interpretations of existing norms. Her book makes clear that ordinary people’s mobilizations have been the motor behind the tremendously expanded attention to human rights as a meaningful way to define people’s aspirations and violations. As she sees it, to capture the popular face of human rights is the contribution of a social historian: “Human rights tragedies are tangible events about people with faces, names, families, and histories. They must be placed in their specific historical contexts.”19 She “demonstrates how social structures are built up from transnational interactions.”20 This latter point is the central concern of her other main work related to human rights, on international humanitarian law, and it is why she turned to transnational research. In 2001–2002, Jean took a long research leave and embarked on her archival research on the Geneva Convention and the Red Cross, that is, on international humanitarian law in the long nineteenth century. Upon her return, she began to write Advocating Dignity, and also laid out for historians the outlines of the history of international human rights and humanitarian law, in an essay for an American Historical Association pamphlet series showcasing new historical approaches.21 The Geneva Convention now became her lasting focus. She said more about why, but for now let us note that medical provision in wartime was a setting for gendered nationalism and for self-conscious internationalism, both of which were antecedents to the League of Nations and United Nations eras. She notes moreover that war throws into sharp relief the gendering of the ideological distinction between “home front” and “combat front.” The gap between ideology and reality is especially sharp as women’s combat front experiences remain largely elided from the historical record, both in the subject matter she researches and more generally. Over the 2000s and 2010s, she gave numerous presentations and published several articles related to the development of new channels of transnational communication and institution-building via international humanitarian law and nursing, international law more generally, and women’s transnational activism. Her most recent publication in this area is a 2018 article, “A New Look at International Law: Gendering the Practices of Humanitarian Medicine in Europe’s ‘Small Wars,’ 1879–1907.”22

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Jean’s findings here concern the translation of norms into practice in the field, as revealed by the words of those directly involved. She commented: “That article is on the malleability of what was understood as humanitarian work, which was, until revision of the Geneva Conventions in 1977, limited to international war, that is, war between sovereign states. That definition left out colonial war, civil war, and many other deadly conflicts, because the combatants were not part of sovereign states and so not entitled to Geneva Convention protections—a holdover from imperial international law. But even though there could be a prohibition on bringing neutral soldiers into imperial wars, they did fight and did claim humanitarian protections, and those humanitarian projects could be used to mask imperial projects.” Jean’s research reveals civilian men and women as well as military bureaucracies seizing opportunities created by Geneva law to express patriotic duty, further their professionalization—also as women—and to manage public reactions to colonial bloodshed.23 The Geneva Convention set norms for reciprocal, impartial provision of medical and other service in wars between states, but men and women on the ground extended Geneva law to colonial wars. Colonial conflicts could now be legitimized by supposedly “humanitarian” aid that was in fact aid to the colonial state itself, as indigenous resisters to colonialism very rarely benefited.24 Actions of people on the ground also led to a global norm of the distinctive “gender division of labor in battlefield nursing” that was in place by the outbreak of World War I.25 Norms alone could have not created this institutional change; rather, it was states’ decisions to adopt the Geneva Conventions and then men and women adapting those humanitarian norms out of a range of motives and in a range of settings that rendered, paradoxically, national military medical provision more and more similar over time, and that “reinforced an expanding peacetime domestic medical infrastructure that tied home front and battlefield services together.”26 A pattern emerged: “first came the use of philanthropically-trained nurses on an ad hoc basis, then contract, or government-authorized female nurses, and, around the turn of the twentieth century, the establishment of a permanent army nursing corps and reserve service.”27 This research shows us a level of transnational contact and normative expectations that cannot be captured at the national level only. For Jean, the history of human rights and of humanitarianism comprises a richly empirical field of inquiry that connects legal and policy expertise to social action. She seeks to reveal how human rights and humanitarian norms have created forums for voices, voices that historians and others have explored only unevenly and sometimes superficially to date (especially beyond the better-known US and European settings). Acquaintance with the broader field of human rights together with em-

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pirically grounded research in specific settings offers a grasp of both the power of social movements and of world political economy. The inspiration vital to social change as well as critique must both stay in view. My conversations with Jean focused on how these themes of her work emerged, and how and why the scale of her historical conceptualization moved to the transnational and global. The interplay of teaching and activism, and especially her intellectual collaboration with her nowdeceased spouse Donald Quataert, was important to that process.

A Conversation About Activism, Teaching, and Historical Research Jean embarked on her academic career in tandem with Donald. A 1974 PhD trained at the University of California, Los Angeles, she moved to Houston, Texas when Donald likewise finished his PhD and was hired in 1974 as a history professor at the University of Houston main campus. For the first two years in Houston, Jean taught as adjunct professor at North Harris County College, which had itself opened only in 1973.28 In 1976 she obtained a tenure-track professorship at the University of Houston at Clear Lake City, another new campus, having opened only in 1974.29 University of Houston-Clear Lake was founded as an innovative, interdisciplinary campus and its women’s studies program started in 1975. “My cohort of faculty colleagues at University of Houston-Clear Lake was exciting and pioneering. We had the only women’s studies program in Houston—ten years earlier than the University of Houston’s main campus.30 We had interdisciplinary lunch discussions about things like, What is a turning point in history? Why should wars be assumed to be turning points? Activist women from Houston drove the 30 miles down the freeway to come to our lunches, which were about doing history (and other humanities disciplines). It seems somewhat strange now that there was so much community interest in the work of women’s history and women’s studies, but there was. Community support, involvement, etc. was key to why women’s history became an area of academic study.” In 1986, after a decade in Houston, she and Donald moved to upstate New York to teach at Binghamton University. Here they found an unusually stimulating environment for innovative thinking and were active in graduate training and numerous intellectual collaborations in and out of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations under the direction of Immanuel Wallerstein. Our conversation reached back even earlier than their Houston years, in my attempt to learn how women’s history had first gained her atten-

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tion. Jean recalled: “I was definitely interested in women’s history, and I am a pioneer in that field. But the impetus for my work was more about a love of history than, say, feminism or my own participation in early second wave feminist debates. I believe there is a whole cohort of pioneer women’s historians who fell in love with history as a discipline—and then integrated that fascination with all of the challenges of pushing for a new subfield of history.” And why history? “As an undergraduate, I had wanted to be in the foreign service. But the Vietnam War convinced me that I could not represent my country—not in that climate. My undergraduate major was in interdisciplinary International Relations, but within that I was drawn to history—a new interest for me at the time. As a graduate student in history at Columbia University, I realized that history was a subjective narrative that omitted women. I wanted to write my MA thesis on the German Revolution, and I noticed that the newspaper sources I was finding in the New York Public Library constantly mentioned something called the ‘Frauenbewegung’ [women’s movement]. Yet the scholarly literature I was reading completely ignored it. The MA thesis was about Ernst Toller—not a women’s history topic—but the experience made me driven about uncovering lost voices. My PhD advisor Peter Loewenberg was not opposed to my interest in women’s history. He did not share it; he was interested in psychohistory. But he let me do whatever I wanted, and left me alone to do it. I became a women’s historian because I experienced firsthand how the writing of history was so one-sided. I had been admitted to the PhD program at UCLA earlier, but chose to study at Columbia. However, given all the unrest, anger, and bad blood all around toward the students and community and the takeover of buildings (which I supported from the outside) in 1967–1968, the climate for serious study at Columbia had deteriorated. Indeed, the young professor I worked with (a professor of Italian history, because the German historian with whom I wanted to study, Fritz Stern, was not teaching that year) was summarily let go later in the year. So at the last moment I reapplied to UCLA and was readmitted, with some financial support as a grader. It was destiny, because I met Donald there in a graduate course in economic history. He had just transferred from Harvard, following his major professor Stanford Shaw. [Uncovering lost voices] has been consistently behind my years of research generally and also now, over the past decade, as co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History, with its specific focus on women. The Journal examines women against the backdrop of the gender system but concentrates on the distinctive sources and methods that can uncover and examine women’s life experiences in their multiplicity and complexity—as intersectional, although that insight came much later of course.

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It was hard to be a women’s historian in the 1970s and 1980s. It was not easy. The struggles were about method, because women’s history essentially emerged as a serious critique of dominant historical methodologies and assumptions. There were hostile colleagues, people had problems with tenure. A frequent response to work in women’s history was ‘This is insignificant.’ It was hard to speak to a hostile audience. Sometimes they stamped their feet in disapproval. At a conference in German history organized by Geoff Eley in 1990, I used the word ‘problematize’ and someone actually jumped up and screamed at me that that was a made-up word. It was shocking to me and to the audience. That reaction was triggered by the word, because apparently the person associated it with postmodernism. The big methodological challenge of women’s history was in the area of labor history, and the concept of class analysis, both for an assessment of the past and for promise of a future. When I presented my work in women’s history, some in the audience felt that I was taking away their vision of the future, as Marxists. They saw history as a way of navigating the future, and with my feminist critique of how they were thinking of class, I was robbing them of their future. It was tough! I mention these experiences because they show that there were these simply visceral reactions to innovation. By the way, this skepticism continues: even today, the Journal of Women’s History, the premier international journal in the field, which has steadily rising submissions and online ‘hits’ (and thus generates very good revenue) is queried at times about our impact factor and acceptance rate by administrators handling tenure cases.” While still in Houston, Jean became interested in world or global history (Jean uses both terms). Together with Marilyn J. Boxer, herself a pioneering scholar and teacher in women’s studies, Jean cowrote several essay-length surveys on women’s history in the West, or “globalizing world,” and published them along with specialists’ essays in the volume Connecting Spheres,31 her first historical writing on a setting beyond Germany. After her 2001–2002 leave, she decided she would no longer continue teaching the Western Civilization course she had been offering. “Global history was an important context for turning to human rights, because the scale of human rights history can be so different from national histories. I had strong influences turning me to global history. My husband, Donald Quataert, as an Ottomanist, was a major influence on me, leading me to turn to thinking at a global scale. Many times I accompanied him to Turkey. Binghamton was at the forefront of world systems theory and the new global history. (However, world systems theory is not the same thing as global history. I found that world systems theory left too little room for agency.) Binghamton University’s Braudel Center was a vibrant place for me. The

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1980s and 1990s were its heyday. Its director, Immanuel Wallerstein, who was close to Donald, invited many fascinating scholars located all over the world to discuss the big issues of capitalism with empirical research on India, Indonesia, China, and more. A major influence for me in global history was Kenneth Pomeranz, with his major synthesis based on empirical work.32 One could say that Kenneth Pomeranz actually does the history of reciprocal connections, not global history, but the key thing is that he presents a persuasive explanatory framework that doesn’t rest on just one place. Another influence for me was Frank Perlin, who did pathfinding work on South Asia. My own colleagues at Binghamton were also influential, including [the historian of China] John Chaffee and [the historian of British North America and the United States] Brendan McConville. The Binghamton graduate students in Ottoman history and East Asian history were very interested in global history and they pushed us faculty colleagues forward. The students pushed us to move into world history! They pushed Donald and me to create a ‘Modern World History’ course for undergraduates. Teaching this course made me shift my historical thinking completely. Donald and I cotaught it, lecture-style, for two years. We were never competitive with each other, and coteaching was fun. We had excellent teaching assistants who were committed to teaching their specialty and also world history in their future careers. We organized the course around a list of six or so questions that moved chronologically. For example: ‘Was 1492 a turning point in world history?’33 Later I taught it alone—the university did not want us to coteach indefinitely. In fact, the last course I taught at Binghamton, in spring 2018, was that course, ‘Modern World History’. It was still a challenge to teach it. I also taught a graduate seminar on Global Inter-Connections, on methodologies of global history. With this course, I wanted to show how one grapples with the complexity of multiple experiences, of resistance, and I wanted to show how history matters today—for debates about the climate, about globalization, about who pays for the shift in resources—about who is responsible for the climate crisis created by ongoing industrial development through cheap fossil fuels and who will pay poorer countries, who did not contribute to global warming, to make the shift to renewable energy sources. All these things are fought out on the basis of our unequal past. In that class we read, for example, Mrinalini Sinha’s book Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire34 about a moment of crisis in the 1930s that had a spiral effect, creating (for a moment) an all-Indian women’s movement transcending caste, class region, etc. and challenging British rule.” The turn to writing on human rights came in the wake of that long leave and in the context of those new forms of teaching.

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“In 2003, I was back from my two-year leave and planned to write what I thought would be an easy synthetic book. The war in Afghanistan was underway, and the Iraq invasion happened that year—so writing a synthetic book about human rights was cathartic for me. Yet, typical for the human rights scholarly literature at the time, the available literature was insufficient, so the project turned out to be much harder than I expected. It was a big shift for me to write a book that was not archivally based—that is not typical of my work. The problem is that without archival research, you can fall into the trap of reiterating Western emphases. The other challenge was that the present kept (and keeps!) slipping away. I couldn’t manage to end the book! Donald said ‘Stop—it’s done!’ so I ended it with a reform of the UN in 2005 that actually turned out to be rather minor. In fact, there is no natural ending for Advocating Dignity. Looking back, I find the book to be too optimistic, a bit naïve. If human rights principles are not applied to powerful countries, things will not work. There is a deep state! Not Trump’s deep state, but the fact that this country [the United States] does not reckon with its own history. There is such a necessity for and a problem with truth in our age. 2003 was a turning point, I think, in how people were thinking about human rights, a turning point regarding optimism. The phrase ‘human rights’ had become powerful—it was used by those in power to empower themselves. Peacekeepers had previously been sent to the borders of conflicts; now they were sent into the midst of civil war. This could not work. One could see how human rights could be used for war and occupation, and for the power of the US presidency. NGOs had a painful reckoning regarding humanitarian intervention—seeing that in reality it was not the solution. More war, whether it bears the euphemism of humanitarian intervention or not, creates yet more human rights violations. Yet when states avoid military interventions—a more accurate term—they may be blamed for a ‘failure of will’. Things also changed quickly around that time in the human rights historiography; the work of Samuel Moyn gained much attention. It has been surprising to me how quickly in such a young field an orthodoxy can take hold. Brad Simpson and I connected back in 2010 over a sense of unease about the major approaches to human rights history that were emerging, and that is how the Routledge History of Human Rights project came about. He and I had both come to the topic with a focus on activism—how people used human rights in specific historical contexts—and we thought that activism should frame major questions in the field. We felt that a focus on human rights from above could become too abstract. The uses of human rights really mattered to both of us from the beginning of the Routledge project—as it did for me in writing Advocating Dignity. Although Brad later had to step away from the project, his contributions to the volume were vital, because he knew the

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junior scholars doing exciting empirical work—he had been to conferences where they were presenting.” I wanted to hear more about Jean’s interest in the Geneva Convention specifically. Her response was as follows. “My big question for any research project I start is to define: ‘What is the big purpose, what is meaning of this?’ It keeps me focused on why something is important, why it is happening. I was intrigued by the ways in which the Geneva Convention brought Germany into contact with other states by way of international law. This took me beyond just Germany as a setting for my historical research. The Geneva Convention is a fascinating vehicle for examining networks of international connection, through institutions. The human connections and the institutions keep it from being about the law per se, or an internalist account of international law. There is a claim of common human fate at the basis of humanitarian law—in the limited context of international war, regarding the suffering wounded soldier of whatever side. Studying the Geneva Convention as an early example of multilateral law allows us to examine how it works, what impact the law has, how it empowers in gendered ways. And it allows us to connect the home front and the battlefield. It opens unusually rich vistas for analysis. Above all, it is a gender project. Humanitarian work is an important arena for women’s politics. This project is about women on the battlefield! Nurses were subordinate, yes, but they did have power. We have women’s voices from these military arenas. I have great material from letters from nurses who were working in colonial wars. They were figuring out how much to reveal about what they were really doing—whether they were treating all wounded, as international humanitarian law prescribed, or just the ones on their side. Nurses knew that their letters were censored, and were reluctant to let even the censor know some things! In fact, there was a big legal distinction between colonial wars and international wars—the Red Cross rules of inviolability for the medical personnel, their legal protection, were only for international wars. Colonial wars were not considered to be actual wars. Yet individual nurses often saw both kinds of conflict, for instance working in the Spanish-American War and then in the war in the Philippines. The complexities of types of war emerge through their voices. Women in war is not always about nurses! World War I had some allwomen medical units—a model that originated in the Balkan Wars. Most women in military medical service in World War I were on the Eastern Front. They faced great dearth; provisions came sometimes only illegally. The Scottish Women’s Hospital Units were comprised of these remarkable all-women units. They did it all: engineering, truck repairs. They were on the front lines. Some died of typhus or other contagious diseases contracted in war. Yet after the war, they were rendered mute, even obliterated from

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the historical record. ‘Duty’, ‘self-sacrifice’, and other formulas served both to express their own view of their commitment, and to cover over and obscure the complexity of their experiences. I may use the material I have gathered for a next project on sexual surveillance as a precondition for sending volunteers. Sexual and other scandals in nursing have led me back to the big emphasis placed on sexual surveillance as a precondition of serving as a nurse. We see an excessive internalization of norms—the idea that if someone misbehaves, it discredits the Red Cross. There is rich social history here. It’s the combination of social history and international law that interests me. The focus on the Geneva Convention brings gender to social history—an older effort that I helped pioneer—as well as bringing gender to international law—and that is pretty new. I am less focused on diplomatic negotiations, legal formulas, or states’ concessions. The story really starts with what happens in real life, on the ground. The sources are key—because it is key to recover the voices of people who are not heard. The battlefield is a great setting for careful research. The new world that emerges with the Geneva Convention, a new world of networks and compacts and new relations between the battlefield and home front, relations showing how humanitarianism is used to support war—that is my subject. Humanitarian care involves a great deal of compromise. It has been interesting to study the Geneva Conventions and see law not as abstract, but as something in action, then and today. In 1990s, the tension between palliative care and human rights arose for the first time, for instance with Human Rights Watch and relief groups like Oxfam. Human Rights Watch stressed the necessity for changes that would begin to address the roots of the problems. In the 1990s they issued a report entitled ‘the lost decade’ that addressed the failure to look at the long-term structural problems undergirding humanitarian crises. Years ago, I had some tensions with colleagues at Binghamton about my work on the Red Cross. They were part-time activists in the field and believed in the possibility of ‘neutrality’, and I at the time was more skeptical. But I have changed my view as the US war on terror unfolds (yes, that should be in the present tense!). Yes, there were problems with the Red Cross’s testimony about camps during World War II. But now, overall, I see that it is key that Red Cross is one of the very few institutions that speaks to all sides. The Red Cross went into the black sites of our war on terror. There is a place for cautious neutrality.” Jean made the following remarks on how her activism has fitted with her teaching. “As an activist, antiwar work has been a consistent theme in my life, more so than human rights. I march, I protest—ever since the Vietnam War. [For a demonstration against the bombing of Cambodia,] I helped shut down Wilshire Boulevard in 1970! Antiwar is the activism thread, abso-

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lutely. Feminism has also been very important to me, of course. Peace and antinuclear work, which was strong especially in the late 1970s and 1980s, has sustained me. I helped archive these peace and antinuclear groups’ materials here at Binghamton University. I’ve marched, of course, in the Women’s March in 2016, but also for climate, for gun control and opposition to family separation at the US southern border. I have also done activism through informational workshops with students, who are receptive to that. I have done them on Israel and Palestine. It’s hard to teach human rights regarding that area, hard to negotiate, but I have come back to it again and again. The main connection is through the choice of topics to talk about in teaching, the choice of voices to showcase. The key is to get students to understand who is making the goods in a world history course. Once a student even said in class, ‘Who wants to hear about labor?’ but I believe that one can’t understand the globalized world of today without knowing who is making stuff at what wage, under what conditions. Economic history was prominent when Donald and I were students, and it was critical history. These days, students may not even know what a Structural Adjustment Program is—and many of them study economics! (I always drew students from a range of disciplines, not just history students.) You can’t understand the 1970s without economic history.” I asked about Jean’s experiences in presenting her work on human rights. From my own experiences, I knew that audiences’ expectations can be very different from what we intend to present, as the field of the history of human rights is new to most and deals with a vast range of specific issues and with emotionally charged subject matter. “It was not always easy. But I was used to that. When I started presenting research and teaching about human rights, sometimes audiences were utterly critical—for various reasons. Presenting work is necessary, but yes, it can be hard. I taught an adult education course on human rights in Binghamton, at the Lyceum, in the early 2000s. The group had no idea about human rights and the relationship to law; I believe they came into the class somewhat curious and left at least recognizing its complexity. I gave talks outside the United States where audiences were strongly negative. Sometimes Donald and I gave seminars together. Once in Toronto, in 2009, we both spoke. The audience was people working with and on refugees and women, and they were sensitive to how human rights NGOs come into local places and co-opt local leaders and begin to set agendas. That time I was better prepared to encounter this kind of experience of human rights discourse, and I acknowledged the limitations and the co-optations. Once in Turkey, in the summer of 2013, I gave a talk at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, and the entire audience was critical. Better put they were simply not interested—they were indifferent.

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They were certain that human rights was a matter of Western hypocrisy and domination. In that same period of time, I spoke to German colleagues about how I favored Turkey joining the European Union, and the immediate response would be ‘But look at how they treat their women!’ My way of moving the discussion onward was to emphasize what I called the ‘transformative potential’ of human rights. All these occasions were eye-openers. I went back to teach and I knew that I had to explain things better. After all, it was in the aftermath of 2003, with the US invasion of Iraq and the whole process of nation-building there that clearly revealed the use— and cooptation—of women’s rights as a reason for US occupation. It showed how human rights and women’s rights could be used for occupation. Think of all the iconic pictures of voting in Iraq—journalists captured women in full burkas holding up purple thumbs showing they had voted. What a potent combination of messages! Women’s rights also became deeply implicated in the rising tension over immigration, and over the idea of Muslim immigrant communities—even the many who had been there for generations—‘becoming’ fully French or German or European. People presumed a contrast between how well the Christian West had supposedly dealt with women and how other communities had, and that spilled over into vitriolic social debates. I became more attuned to the tensions around state and societal uses of human rights which could and did—and still do—divide feminists.” My final question to Jean was: What about the future of human rights research? “I am impressed with the work of ethicist Mary Midgley. She opens one article by saying it is striking how quickly the idea of human rights—only lately added to our moral vocabulary—has been accepted by the public as useful, indeed maybe even indispensable, for talking about the world we live in.35 She says that human rights were picked up by people, and then things exploded in terms of claim-making in the 1990s, taking us unawares. I believe she is right on with this point, as far as historians are concerned. It is no wonder that academics are startled by this quick acceptance of the concept. I believe that humility is called for regarding the future of human rights. Are academics the ones to proclaim them? Human rights’ power is as a grassroots movement. As long as people feel that ‘human rights’ are adding to their lives, they will use them. Human rights will continue if it is a language that is meaningful to them. Sometimes one does feel that one is simply defending classical liberal values to people who believe those values are inadequate or just hypocritical. It is a hard discussion to move forward. We need today wider transnational coalitions, led by people from the Global South. Human rights principles should be a part of that. Human rights should be part of climate, debt, justice, labor women’s movements—not separate from these major issues themes and movements.

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There are a few points I would make about ongoing research. We need more empirical studies at the grassroots level of women’s movements and human rights NGOs—for instance on that issue of whether and how Western funders displace local needs. Just as global history needed those detailed empirical studies if it was to be written well, now we need more detailed empirical studies for the history of human rights, such as those done by Meredith Terretta and others on how colonized people used human rights.36 These are the levels where we can know whether or not human rights discourse really matters. Human rights incorporate a very dynamic notion of time: of the past, today, and the future. That is exciting. Human rights have intergenerational implications, so to speak, and can become an intergenerational dialogue. Human rights are about accountability for past wrongs, and the examination of injustices today, and they speak to the future in the sense of asking what responsibility our generation has to the future generations. For example, they may concern climate change, or debt relief for poor countries with a past of colonial domination, or a more equitable global financial structure. The issue of accountability for historical wrongs is a major stumbling block for moving forward now. Who is responsible for the pollution of our world? Who pays and under what conditions? Contemporary tensions reflect the inequalities of earlier patterns of global integration. Historical work that helps us see how the world came into being can add a lot to current debates. They show that history matters!” Lora Wildenthal is John Antony Weir Professor of History at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Among her publications are The Routledge History of Human Rights, coedited with Jean Quataert; The Language of Human Rights in West Germany; and German Women for Empire, 1884-1945. Notes 1. Quataert and Wildenthal, The Routledge History of Human Rights. This volume of essays showcases new, archivally based research carried out in globally dispersed locations regarding histories of human rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume foregrounds people, institutions, complexity, and activism, and includes less-researched regions and pre-1945 case studies. In other words, its emphases are clearly recognizable as Jean’s. We coauthored the introduction, but otherwise the volume is devoted to others’ scholarship. 2. Jean served as coeditor of the Journal of Women’s History from 2010 until 2020, first with Leigh Ann Wheeler, then with Elisa Camiscioli, both colleagues in the Department of History at Binghamton University.

228 • Lora Wildenthal 3. Her master’s thesis and doctoral thesis led to the monograph Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917. 4. Boxer and Quataert, Connecting Spheres. A revised edition appeared in 1999. Among several articles related to the labor and protoindustrialization project, see Quataert, “The Shaping of Women’s Work in Manufacturing.” 5. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy. 6. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality. 7. However, Jean has continued to edit and to contribute essays on gender in the historiography of modern Germany—for example, Hagemann and Quataert, Gendering Modern German History. 8. Bunch, “Transforming Human Rights from a Feminist Perspective,” 13. 9. See, for example, Malkki, “Refugees and Exile.” See also Charlesworth, “Human Rights as Men’s Rights,” and for more detail, see Charlesworth, “What Are ‘Women’s International Human Rights’?” On the focus on state-caused and politically motivated violence typical of the post–World War II era, see also Roth, “Domestic Violence as an International Human Rights Issue.” 10. Zia, “Asma Jahangir”; Saleh, “Lina Ben Mhenni.” 11. The literature is now vast, but see Quataert, “The Gender Factor since the 1970s.” See also the influential early interventions in the following collections: Cook, Human Rights of Women, and Peters and Wolper, Women’s Rights, Human Rights. 12. Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 2. 13. Stillman, “America’s Other Family-Separation Crisis”; Flock, “How Far Can Abused Women Go to Protect Themselves?” 14. For example, Hodgson, Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights. 15. Quataert, Advocating Dignity. 16. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 267. 17. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 276. 18. A sampling of other readings from the 2017 version of her syllabus includes Solzenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Beah, A Long Way Gone; and Nguyen, The Refugees. The first iteration of the course, in 2000, assigned Ishay’s The Human Rights Reader; Chang, The Rape of Nanking; and Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families; Carlson, I Remember Julia; Human Rights Watch, The Human Rights Watch Global Report on Women’s Human Rights; and Locke’s Two Treatises on Government. 19. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 12. 20. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 12. 21. Quataert, The Gendering of Human Rights. 22. Quataert, “A New Look at International Law.” See also Quataert, “International Law and the Laws of War,” and Quataert, “Gendered Medical Services.” 23. Quataert, “A New Look at International Law,” 568. 24. Quataert, “A New Look at International Law,” 568. 25. Quataert, “A New Look at International Law,” 548. 26. Quataert, “A New Look at International Law,” 569. Already in Advocating Dignity, Jean was alert to how international law can be extended in ways that have more to do with people and bureaucracies than the letter of the law. She notes

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27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

that “incorporation” usually refers to a state’s integration of the content of an international treaty into domestic law after that state has signed the treaty, but she also presents examples in which incorporation has taken place even where a state—such as the United States—has refused to sign the relevant international treaty. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 200. Quataert, “A New Look at International Law,” 561. Now called Lone Star College-North Harris. Now called University of Houston-Clear Lake, it is located near the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) complex, about thirty miles outside Houston. And, one might add, the entire Houston area. For example, my own institution, Rice University, did not institutionalize women’s studies in any way until 1990. Boxer and Quataert, Connecting Spheres. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. In one iteration of the course, the six themes listed on the syllabus were as follows: “conquest of the new world and its consequences; industrial transformations in home, workshop and factory; subjects and citizens; revolts and revolutions; nationalisms, wars and decolonization; and globalization.” Sinha, Specters of Mother India. Other readings included Pomeranz, The Great Divergence; Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; Woodside, Lost Modernities; Cooper, Holt, and Scott, Beyond Slavery; Bose, A Hundred Horizons; ClancySmith, Mediterraneans; and Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts. See Midgley, “Toward an Ethic of Global Responsibility.” See, among Terretta’s other publications, Terretta, “Why Then Call It the Declaration of Human Rights?”

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007. Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Boxer, Marilyn J., and Jean H. Quataert, eds. Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Bunch, Charlotte. “Transforming Human Rights from a Feminist Perspective.” In Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, edited by Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, 11–17. New York: Routledge, 1995. Carlson, Eric Stener. I Remember Julia: Voices of the Disappeared. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

230 • Lora Wildenthal Charlesworth, Hilary. “Human Rights as Men’s Rights.” In Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, edited by Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, 103–13. New York: Routledge, 1995. ———. “What Are ‘Women’s International Human Rights’?” In Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives, edited by Rebecca J. Cook, 58–84. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Clancy-Smith, Julia. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in the Age of Migration c. 1800-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Cook, Rebecca J., ed. Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Cooper, Frederick, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2001. Enloe, Cynthia. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Flock, Elizabeth. “How Far Can Abused Women Go to Protect Themselves?” New Yorker, 20 January 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/ 20/how-far-can-abused-women-go-to-protect-themselves. Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. Hagemann, Karen, and Jean H. Quataert, eds. Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiographies. New York: Berghahn, 2007. Hodgson, Dorothy L., ed. Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Human Rights Watch. The Human Rights Watch Global Report on Women’s Human Rights. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Ishay, Micheline R., ed. The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches Documents from the Bible to the Present. New York: Routledge, 1997. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Malkki, Liisa H. “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495–523. Midgley, Mary. “Toward an Ethic of Global Responsibility.” In Human Rights in Global Politics, edited by Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler, 160–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Mosse, George L. Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Refugees. New York: Grove, 2017. Peters, Julie, and Andrea Wolper, eds. Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 1995. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Quataert, Jean H. Advocating Dignity. Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

How Do People Use Human Rights, and What Happens When They Do? • 231 ———. “The Gender Factor since the 1970s: Universality and the Private Sphere.” In Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics, 149–81. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. ———. “Gendered Medical Services in Red Cross Field Hospitals during the First Balkan War and World War I.” In Peace, War, and Gender from Antiquity to the Present: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Jost Dülffer and Robert Frank, 219–33. Essen: Klartext, 2009. ———. The Gendering of Human Rights in the International Systems of Law in the Twentieth Century. Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 2006. ———. “International Law and the Laws of War, 1864–1914.” In 1914–1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, edited by Oliver Janz et al., 2014–2022. http://www.1914-1918-online.net. ———. “A New Look at International Law: Gendering the Practices of Humanitarian Medicine in Europe’s ‘Small Wars,’ 1879–1907.” Human Rights Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2018): 547–69. ———. Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. ———. “The Shaping of Women’s Work in Manufacturing: Guilds, Households, and the State in Central Europe, 1648-1870.” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (December 1985): 1122–48. ———. Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813-1916. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Quataert, Jean H., and Lora Wildenthal, eds. The Routledge History of Human Rights. London: Routledge, 2020. Roth, Kenneth. “Domestic Violence as an International Human Rights Issue.” In Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives, edited by Rebecca J. Cook, 326–39. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Saleh, Heba. “Lina Ben Mhenni, Blogger and Activist, 198-2020.” Financial Times, 31 January 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/1904de84-42b0-11ea-a43a-c4 b328d9061c. Sinha, Mrinalini. Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Solzenitsyn, Aleksandr. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. New York: Signet, 2008. Stillman, Sarah. “America’s Other Family-Separation Crisis.” New Yorker, 5 November 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/05/americas-oth er-family-separation-crisis. Terretta, Meredith. “‘Why Then Call It the Declaration of Human Rights?’ The Failures of Universal Human Rights in Colonial Africa’s Internationally Supervised Territories.” In The Routledge History of Human Rights, edited by Jean H. Quataert and Lora Wildenthal, 203–21. London: Routledge, 2020. Woodside, Alexander. Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea and the Hazards of World History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Zia, Afiya Shehrbano. “Asma Jahangir: Personifying the Human Rights Debate in Pakistan.” In The Routledge History of Human Rights, edited by Jean H. Quataert and Lora Wildenthal, 392–411. London: Routledge, 2020.

AFTERWORD

E E E Jean Quataert and the Politics of the Personal Belinda Davis

What an honor to participate in this collection celebrating Jean Quataert! I first met Jean in person in 1987, a year after the historic Rutgers workshop to which Kathleen Canning and Jennifer Evans refer in the book’s introduction.1 As she was to Jennifer and Kathleen, Jean was already well known to me before I met her, through Reluctant Feminists and her coedited book Socialist Women, along with her seminal articles on gender, labor, household, and the state in the Oberlausitz.2 Reading these texts prepared me for meeting the person. Her curiosity about and concern for her subjects jumped off the page, so I was little surprised that those characteristics informed her approach to those she met in the present. But as a second-year graduate student, I could not have known what the acquaintance would mean for me for decades to come. The 1987 in-person meeting took place on the campus of Binghamton University, where Jean, together with Deborah Hertz and the broader German Women’s History Study Group (all young enough themselves),3 graciously hosted an event dedicated to nurturing Nachwuchs, a new crop of graduate students hungry for inspiration. A couple of us had recently entered grad school following full-time activism; most of us were working with male advisers.4 Several of those present went on to become leading historians of women, gender, and sexuality studies.5 Jean and the others who organized the workshop constituted critical examples of excellent scholarship; they were also committed activists, proving by example that it was possible to combine the two in forms that some of us deeply craved. This was all aside from Jean’s caring and humanity, which informed her scholarship and activism both. Indeed, I cannot imagine how Jean was able to make time for all those who wanted to spend time with her and to bask in her warmth and wisdom. There was somehow never a conference or other meeting when this very senior scholar did not have time for a meal and heart-to-heart together. The humanity that emanated from her work was as notable in her deep listening skills. Jean was always pres-

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ent; her capacious thought was consistently grounded in the lived realities of the moment. I recall taking to the streets with her to protest George W. Bush’s declaration of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in the middle of the March 2003 Toronto conference “Gendering Modern German History: Rewritings of the Mainstream (19th-20th Centuries).”6 I remember no less the extraordinarily physically fit Jean cheering me on in a conference hotel gym. In light of these multiple and mutually informing talents, is it any wonder that when Donald Quataert died, Jean was able to take on many of his current graduate students in Ottoman history? I am thus obviously only one of scores who claim this inspiration from Jean as a scholar, activist, and human being. It is evident in the pages of this volume, reflecting an unusual array of topics, methods, practices, and themes but revolving consistently around some critical points. One among these is the considerable expanse of time and space covered in these chapters. These are not just positives in themselves: they are part of Jean’s lesson that changing the lens helps one see things that were previously invisible. Bringing women into the picture permits us to see, per K. Molly O’Donnell, how colonialism actually remained an important discourse in Germany well beyond the end of World War I. Stretching beyond the nation renders Anne Moody and her influence visible beyond 1969—and, as Leigh Ann Wheeler shows us, she was more important as a civil rights activist than has been recognized, in and also outside the U.S. Transnational perspective represents moreover not simply transcendence of the nation as a far-too-limited unit of historical analysis; it also permits historical subjects’ own active rethinking of the role of the nation, as Wheeler further demonstrates. This relates in turn to Jean’s teachings concerning space more generally: the fording of the public and private she discusses, for example, in her interview with Lora Wildenthal; the role of the “glocal” to which Shelley E. Rose so compellingly attends. Of course, this challenge was at the heart of the “second-wave” feminist movement, but Jean’s own historical work defying such boundaries remains exemplary. Then there is Jean’s attention to the specifics of human experience that made her at once such a wonderful historian and friend. This accounted for not only the “fine-grained storytelling” in which she engaged but also the challenge to any predictable function of ideology, as evident in the chapters by Glenn B. Ramsey and William Smaldone. It is what might bring us to understand and find valuable attending to the complicated interests of the conservative women about whom O’Donnell writes, as we might the Social Democratic women Smaldone addresses. It offers a sense of the complex identities and their relation to the interpersonal ties about which Ute Ritz-Deutch writes. Human experience and response

234 • Belinda Davis

often defied the workings of the law and other institutions, as is clear variously in Wildenthal’s and Rose’s contributions; it is what teaches us that concepts like “human rights” must always be historically situated in time, place, and experience. These specifics, finally, allow for reflection back on the academy itself, and the relation explicitly to women’s studies and to women historians, as Karen Hagemann demonstrates in her carefully grounded and situated chapter: in, for example, the “leaky pipeline” that permitted only limited translation of lofty ideas into practice. Jean was not alone in these methodological moves, but her work has been both seminal and enduring in advancing these ideas. Further, it has been consistently related to her commitments as an activist, and as a person, inspiring emulation. Each of the preceding chapters offers a powerful sense of Jean’s influence, all aside from the effects of all these contributions holistically. Several interrelated elements of Jean’s work have been most important to me specifically. A number are mentioned already: close connection between scholarship and activism, and the need for historiography to serve social change, connection, too, between scholarly vision and a humanity deeply grounded in real people and their real lives. Yet another one is attention to how change takes place, including as a piece of how historical subjects have understood their own contributions to change. In this volume’s introduction, Kathleen Canning and Jennifer Evans write: “Lurking in this presumption of modest or failed impact,” against which Jean has written, “is that sense . . . that the studies of gender or sexuality only matter when and where they have a transformative effect, turning upside down something significantly larger than themselves—master narratives, mainstream history, established chronologies and causalities.” We can consider this, too, in the context of rethinking change. Thus, historical subjects may view their own impact contemporaneously or retrospectively as “modest” or “failed,” whereas we as historians can link these impacts together to tell stories of greater change. But these findings must also speak to our understanding of the change to which we ourselves and those around us contribute. Activists in 1960s–1980s West Germany whom I interviewed related to me transformations in commonplace understanding of radical change from either a question of historic moment or, conversely, voluntaristic, vanguardist action that would help bring about apocalyptic transformation. Over the course of the 1970s, many, especially those associated with the emerging feminism of the period, saw it increasingly as a matter of simply keeping at it. There were no “failures”: there were experiments that didn’t work as hoped, and there were lessons to be learned and shared with others. Time might be “lumpy,” and change might take place faster or slower

Jean Quataert and the Politics of the Personal • 235

at times.7 The critical mass of acceptance of gender fluidity in the last years offers one example of an acceleration after decades of activism. This understanding, drawn from activists’ personal experience of many years, transforms understanding of how radical change can take place—and all the work taking place between perceived flashpoints—as well as offering the sobering wisdom that no change is permanent, requiring unceasing vigilance and continued action. This was, I thought, a truly significant lesson these activists shared. But then, I realized, I knew this already: it is a lesson embedded throughout Jean’s work, whether in Reluctant Feminists or Advocating Dignity. Of course it is. And here is yet more evidence of how much we have all learned from Jean, who left us far too soon.

Belinda Davis is a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author or coeditor of five books, including Social Movements after ’68: Selves and Solidarities in West Germany and Beyond and The Internal Life of Politics: Extraparliamentary Opposition in West Germany, 1962–1983. She is also an activist, involved with groups including the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, on which she is co-editing an oral history.

Notes 1. Caplan, “The Meaning of Gender in German History Rutgers University, 25–27 April 1986.” 2. These include Quataert, “A Source Analysis in German Women’s History”; Quataert, “Social Insurance and the Family Work of Female Oberlausitz Home Weavers in the Late 19th Century”; Quataert, “The Shaping of Women’s Work in Manufacturing”; and Quataert, “The Politics of Rural Industrialization.” I continue to press graduate students to read these pioneering pieces, to understand sources of the linkages between family organization and economies; state surveillance and benefits; patterns of urbanization and “combined and uneven” development. 3. Including additionally Renate Bridenthal, Jane Caplan, Atina Grossmann, Marion Kaplan, and Molly Nolan. 4. It is to the credit of my own male coadviser, Geoff Eley, that I attended the workshop: I had had little connection personally to women’s and gender history before this inspiring event. 5. Such as Kathleen Canning, Elizabeth Heineman, and Dagmar Herzog, as well as excellent scholars of women and gender from Germany, including Christiane Eifert and the late Susanne Rouette, another source of long-term connection and inspiration.

236 • Belinda Davis 6. Essays emerging out of this conference were coedited by Jean and the conference convenor Karen Hagemann. See Quataert and Hagemann, eds., Gendering Modern German History. 7. On “lumpy time,” see Sewell Jr., Logics of History.

Bibliography Caplan, Jane. “The Meaning of Gender in German History Rutgers University, 25– 27 April 1986.” German History 4, no. 1 (1987): 36–38. Hagemann, Karen, and Jean H. Quataert, eds. Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. Quataert, Jean H. “A Source Analysis in German Women’s History: Factory Inspectors’ Reports and the Shaping of Working-Class Lives, 1878–1914.” Central European History 16, no. 2 (1983): 99–121. ———. “Social Insurance and the Family Work of Female Oberlausitz Home Weavers in the Late 19th Century.” In German Women in the Nineteenth Century, edited by John C. Fout, 270–94. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984. ———. “The Politics of Rural Industrialization: Class, Gender, and Collective Protest in the Saxon Oberlausitz of the Late Nineteenth Century.” Central European History 20, no. 2 (June 1987): 91–124. ———. “The Shaping of Women’s Work in Manufacturing: Guilds, Households and the State in Central Europe, 1648–1870.” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (December 1985): 1122–48. Sewell Jr., William H. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Index

E E E Abitur (educational exam), 164, 167 Alderson (federal prison), 191 Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewekschaftsbund (ADGB), 72 Anders als die Andern, 85–86, 96. See also Weimar Republic and censorship Arbeiterwohlfahrt (welfare organization), 73, 75–76 Article 118, 84–85, 94–95, 97–98. See also Weimar Republic and censorship Ausland und Heimat (colonial journal), 50. See also Kolonie und Heimat Bäumer, Gertrud, 48. See also Bund deutscher Frauenvereine; German Colonialism Bebel, August, 19, 25, 28, 32 Ben Mhenni, Lina, 211 Beneš Decrees, 115 Bernstein, Eduard, 64 Betriebsrätezeitschrift, 74 Black America and Germany, 131, 137. See also racism in America; Moody, Anne Black Panthers (political organization), 137, 139–40, 150 Black September (terrorist organization), see Munich Massacre Boetticher, Else von, 38, 50 Böll, Annemarie, 133, 136, 138, 142 Böll, Heinrich, 133–34, 136, 138, 140, 142, 145–46 Brand, Adolf, 20–21, 30–31, 33. See also Der Eigene Braun, Lily, 64 Bredow, Hedwig von, 47 Bund der Vertriebenen, 115–16

Bund deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF), 42–43, 48 Bush, George W. (U.S. President), 233 Caplan, Jane, 3 Carter, Jimmy (U.S. President), 199–200 Catholic church; interfaith dialogues, 193; mission work, 194, 198–200; Vatican II, 198, 202 churchwomen, 192, 194-195, 198, 202 Clarke, Maura, 192. See also churchwomen Cleveland Latin American Mission Team (CLAM), 192, 197–98, 200–2 collective guilt, 122–23 Coming of Age in Mississippi, 131, 133–34, 137–38, 142 Danube Swabians, 108–9, 124–25; history of settlement, 109–10; expulsion of, 111–14, 119; and National Socialism, 116–17 Das Volksrecht (USPD newspaper), 70 Davis, Angela, 139–40, 142, 151 Der Eigene (homophile journal), 19–24, 27 Die Genossin (socialist feminist journal), 74 Die Gleichheit (socialist feminist journal), 63, 73 denazification, 160 Die Prostitution (Weimar film), 89 Die Zukunft (SDP journal), 30. See also Eulenburg affair Dissmann, Robert, 69

238 • Index Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mittel Europa, 114 Donovan, Jean, 192, 196, 198. See also churchwomen Duke John Albert of Mecklenburg, 41–42, 47 El Salvador, 192–94, 196, 199, 201, 203 Eulenburg affair, 30–31, 33 Erwachen in Mississippi, see Coming of Age in Mississippi

German colonialism, 38, 48–50, 53, 233; and racism, 44, 49; women’s leagues, 10, 38–40, 210 German Colonial Society, 40, 42, 48, 50, 53. See also Frauenbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft German Colonial Welfare Lottery, 41 German reunification, 159 German Women’s History Study Group, 232 Geschäftsfilme, 91 Geschichte und Gesellschaft (history journal), 158 Gulf War, 37, 210

feminist socialism, 3–6, 61–64, 67–68, 71–73, 75, 77, 210. See also Die Gleichheit Fidus (artist), 21–22 First World War, 46–47, 64–65, 67, 86, 90; and sexual morality, 86–87, 90; and wounded veterans, 88 Ford, Ita, 192. See also churchwomen Frauen, die der Abgrund Verschlingt (Weimar film), 84. See also Weimar Republic and censorship Frauenbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Women’s League), 37–38, 40, 50, 210; and the First World War, 43–46; and the Weimar Republic, 47–56. See also German Colonial Society Frauenrechtlerinnen, 3 Frauenwelt (socialist feminist journal), 73–74 Freundesliebe, 20–24, 26–27, 32. See also pederasty Frey, Ludwig, 26 Friedländer, Benedict, 21, 27, 29–30, 32 Frobenius, Else. See Boetticher, Else von

Härtling, Peter, 133. Heidelberg Program (SPD initiative), 61 Heyl, Hedwig, 41, 43, 45–47, 50. See also Frauenbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft Hirschfeld, Magnus, 20–21, 24, 31–33, 87. See also Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen; Wissenschaftlichhumanitären Komitee historical profession, male dominance in, 158–59, 161 Historische Zeitschrift (history journal), 158 Hochschulumbau Ost, 159–60 homosexual activism in the Wilhelmine Era, 17–19, 25, 28, 32–33. See also Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (GdE); Hirschfeld, Magnus; Wissenschaftlichhumanitären Komitee human rights, 208, 213–14, 234; and women’s exclusion 211–12 Hyänen der Lust (Weimar film), 84. See also Weimar Republic and censorship

Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (GdE) (gay rights organization), 18, 20, 24, 31–33; and pederasty, 22–24, 32. See also Der Eigene Geneva conventions, 1, 121, 211, 216–17, 223–24

industrialization, 7, 17, 20, 26; and climate change, 221; and women, 8, 63, 88 International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH), 171–72

Index • 239 Iraq War, 233 Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (homophile journal), 18–19, 21, 27. See also Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitee Jahangir, Asma, 211 Jarek concentration camp, 108, 128 Journal of Women’s History, 9, 131, 151, 208, 219–20, 227 Juchacz, Marie, 66–68, 71, 73–77 Katte, Max, 27. See also Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen Kazel, Dorothy, 192, 196–200. See also churchwomen Kolonie und Heimat (colonial journal), 41, 44. See also Ausland und Heimat; Frauenbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft labor history and women, 3, 169, 172, 215, 220 Lebensraum, 41 Lebensreform (social movement), 17, 32 Lidtke, Vernon, 2 Mackay, John Henry, 21 Männerbund, 21 Mittelbau (academic positions), 165 Moody, Anne, 131–34, 136–44, 146–51, 233 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 214 Munich Massacre, 144–45, 148–49 nationalism, 122, 132, 146; Black, 131, 146; German, 9, 53, 67; German women’s nationalism, 9, 44, 49, 51; and sports, 144, 146–48; Yugoslav, 118–20 Nazi Germany (state), 54, 114–15, 120–21, 136, 160; and conscription, 117; and women, 51, 54, 162–63; occupation of Yugoslavia, 110–11 Nazi Party (NSDAP); SDP opposition to; 76–77; women’s support of, 77 new woman, 62, 88

Oberg, Eduard, 24. See also Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitee (WhK) Paragraph 175, 17–19, 21, 23, 85 patriotism, 37, 40, 44, 53, 57, 146, 217; women’s, 9, 37–38, 43–44, 46–47, 50, 54 pederasty, 20, 22–23, 27 Pinchot, Diane Therese, 191–93, 196, 203 populism, 1, 37 propaganda, 44, 48, 53–54, 73, 76, 95, 110 prostitution, 23, 29, 87, in Weimar cinema, 89–90, 95–96 Quataert, Donald, 208–9, 218, 220–21, 233 Quataert, Jean, xi–xv, 1–10, 17, 37, 61, 83, 107, 131, 157, 208, 218–20, 232–35; and activism, 10, 37, 208, 233; books: Advocating Dignity, 191, 211, 214–16, 235; Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1–2, 5–6, 157, 191, 232, 235; Staging Philanthropy, 107, 210–11, 213. See also Journal of Women’s History racism in America, 131–33, 137–42; and athleticism, 147–49; See also Black Panthers; German colonialism Red Cross, 37–38, 40, 44, 108, 114, 210–11, 216, 223–24 refugees, 108–9, 122–24, 211, 225. See also Danube Swabians Reichslichtspielgesetz (National Motion Picture Law), 97–98 Romero, Óscar, 193, 199–200, 203 S. Fischer Verlag (publisher), 134, 136, 142 Sagitta, see Mackay, John Henry Sappho und Sokrates, 24. See also Hirschfeld, Magnus

240 • Index School of Americas, see Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation Seitz, Theodor, 47 Sender, Toni, 66, 68–71, 74–75, 77 Siebert, Clara, 83–84 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 4, 6, 47, 61, 66, 161; and opposition to NSDAP, 76–77; and schism with USPD/KPD, 6, 65, 70–71; and women’s issues, 63–67, 72–77. See also feminist socialism social welfare, 6–7, 65, 67–68, 75–76, 94, 96, 98. See also Arbeiterwohlfahrt Spohr, Max, 24. See also Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitee (WhK) Sport and Nationalism conference (PEN), 144–46, 149. See also Moody, Anne; nationalism Stoiber, Edmund. See Bund der Vertriebenen Straus, Austin, 132, 144 Stresemann, Gustav, 54–55 third sex (Hirschfeld theory), 20–21, 26, 32 Tito, Josep Brotz, 111, 119–20 total war, 10, 210 transnational connections, 191, 195, 209. See also Black America and Germany Treaty of Versailles, 49–50 universities in Germany, 160–63; and reunification, 176–79

Ursulines (religious order), 191, 195–97, 202–3 Verband der deutschen Vaterländische Frauenvereine (women’s association), 40 Verlorene Töchter (Weimar film), 84. See also Weimar republic and censorship Weimar Republic, 18, 38, 46–47, 53–54, 93; and censorship, 83–85, 88, 90–92, 94–98; and women’s experiences, 49, 51, 62–63, 72, 75 Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), 191–92, 196 Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitee (WhK) (gay rights organization), 18, 20, 24, 25, 29–33. See also Hirschfeld, Magnus; Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen women in German academia, 160–61; in East Germany; 168–72; in West Germany, 161–68, 173–75 women’s history, 3, 219–20, 223; in Germany, 170–72, 175–76; after reunification, 176–79 Yugoslavia, 109–14; memory politics of, 114–20 Zentrum gegen Vertreibung, 116. See also Bund der Vertriebenen Zetkin, Clara, 6, 63–65. See also Die Gleichheit Zietz, Luise, 6, 63, 65–66