Out of the Ruins: Fashioning Berlin, 1945‒1952

Abstract

In the politically contentious, materially deprived climate of post-World War II Berlin, fashion played a primary role in the decimated city’s revival, the occupiers’ policies, and the personal reconstructions that German women undertook. Given Berlin’s and Berliners’ long historical relationship with all things sartorial, it is unsurprising that fashion, which offered the opportunity to shed former identities and the trauma of defeat, figured prominently in their dual reconstructions. While scholarship has emphasized the roles that music and art played in the occupiers’ strategies as they competed for the hearts and minds of the occupied, an examination of their policies shows that they viewed fashion—its economic potency, employment potential, and transformative cultural power—as a site that warranted attention. The reemergence of fashion-related industries and media from the rubble offered a hopeful future in the midst of utter collapse. And, as German women sought to wrap a more acceptable external image around their defeated and demoralized bodies to defy and transform the wretched material and spiritual conditions surrounding them, they began to bridge the divide between occupier and occupied. It just so happened that the fashion project of the western occupiers aligned itself with the self-fashioning project of the occupied.