Das Dienstfraulein auf dem Bahnhof: Frauen im offentlichem Raum im Blick der Berliner Bahnhofsmission 1894-1939

Abstract

In this study of the Railway Travellers’ Mission (Bahnhofsmission), a charitable service first organized in 1894 and closed down by the National Socialist government in 1936, Astrid Mignon Kirchhof investigates the relationship between conceptions of gender, space and morality. Leaders of the Protestant Domestic Mission (Innere Mission) and Protestant women’s organizations identified railway stations as sites of danger and temptation to the many young women who streamed from the countryside into the city. Protestant activists feared that these young women, whom they pictured as naïve country girls, might end up in the clutches of pimps who would lead them into a life of prostitution. In order to rescue, advise and assist ‘endangered’ women, another kind of woman—the charitable worker, marked by her respectable dress and motherly manner—occupied these threatening spaces. Though travellers’ missions presumably existed throughout Germany and in other countries, Kirchhof focuses on Berlin’s many long-distance railway stations. Her central question concerns the ways in which charitable work changed the lives both of the women who administered the help and of those who received it.