Friendship without Borders: Women's Stories of Power, Politics, and Everyday Life across East and West Germany by Phil Leask

Abstract

Reviewed by: Friendship without Borders: Women's Stories of Power, Politics, and Everyday Life across East and West Germany by Phil Leask Kara Ritzheimer Friendship without Borders: Women's Stories of Power, Politics, and Everyday Life across East and West Germany. By Phil Leask. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Pp. ix + 326. Cloth $149.00. ISBN 9781789206555. On September 1, 1940, a group of teenage girls who were classmates in Schönebeck, a small town in central Germany, "made a solemn promise" to meet ten years hence at the Cathedral Square in nearby Magdeburg. And so, on September 1, 1950, fourteen of these girls, now young women, "gathered in the square, in the shadow of the damaged cathedral" (1). They made two important decisions. First, they would meet annually. Second, they would start and circulate a Rundbrief (circular). From 1950 to 2000, as many as thirty women contributed approximately a thousand letters to this Rundbrief. Nearly half of these former classmates migrated to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) while the other half remained in what became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). These letters form the basis of Phil Leask's 2020 monograph Friendship without Borders: Women's Stories of Power, Politics, and Everyday Life across East and West Germany, alongside interviews the author [End Page 600] conducted with a handful of these women between 2012 and 2016 and photos these women pasted into the Rundbrief. Friendship Without Borders consists of three interwoven histories. The first is a history of these individual women. Contributors shared updates about their children, spouses, parents, homes and gardens, jobs, careers, health, travels, and everyday experiences. The second is a history of women, gender policy, and family policy in both the FRG and the GDR. And the third, which Leask uses to frame each chapter, is the political, social, and economic history of the two Germanies. The book is organized chronologically. It begins in the 1930s and ends in the early 2000s, and each chapter examines a different decade. Leask traces several themes over the course of these fifty years. The first of these is power and agency. Leask is interested in these "nonpolitical" (3) women's sense of agency, their ability and efforts to exercise agency, and the social and political restraints they encountered. He observes that as teenagers, most of these women belonged to the League of German Girls (BDM), an organization the Nazi regime used to "give power at a very local level to hundreds of thousands of young women who were group leaders" (6). It was this sense of power and their ability to build community, he suggests, that led these women to believe they could "build and sustain their own group long after the end of the Nazi regime" (6). The second theme is the shifting position of women in both Germanies and how these particular women understood, at different moments, "what their place was and should be in society" (3). The third theme is that of continuities and ruptures. Leask interestingly observes that women living in the GDR experienced reunification as a larger rupture than Nazi Germany's defeat. In 1945, they had been young and felt capable of starting anew; in 1990, many feared they were too old and financially insecure to start over. Another theme is that of unity. Leask argues that these women hoped that the unity of their group meant that Germany and its people "remained united" despite its—what they hoped was only temporary—division. And finally, Leask explains in the book's introduction that he is eager to identify moments when these women experienced humiliation. Leask uses the Rundbrief skillfully to write an everyday history of the two Germanies, one seen through the eyes of women passing through various life stages. And these women address details that political histories frequently neglect, such as the occupational challenges women encountered in both Germanies, the quality of education and childcare, and the pain of being separated from family members living on the other side of a political boundary. Leask does a fine job of underscoring key factors that increasingly differentiated the experiences of women living in the FRG from those who remained in the GDR. One...