The Politics of the Everyday in Occupied Europe

Abstract

The Politics of the Everyday in Occupied Europe Mary Louise Roberts (bio) Maren Röger. Wartime Relations: Intimacy, Violence, and Prostitution in Occupied Poland, 1939–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. ISBN 9780198817222 (cl.); 9780191858758 (ebook). Raffael Scheck. Love between Enemies: Western Prisoners of War and German Women in World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 398 pp. ISBN 9781108841757 (cl.); 9781108894821 (ebook). Paula Schwartz. Today Sardines Are Not for Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 256 pp. ISBN 9780190681548 (cl.). For historians of gender, traditional military history is arguably the last frontier. Battle narratives peopled with generals and soldiers by definition exclude women. Grand strategy has little to do with the cultural construction of gender. More recently, however, help has arrived in the form of a “new” military history, often called the study of “war and society.” This approach looks beyond the battlefield to understand war within the societies it impacts and generates.1 Central to the successful execution of the “war and society” method is a rethinking of power and politics. Gender historians, well-versed in Foucault, have long assumed a notion of power as inhering in personal relations, particularly sexual relations. While more traditional historians privilege power exercised in military, juridical, or political institutions, women’s historians have attended to the politics of the workplace, the marketplace, the altar, and the bedroom. The “history of the everyday” or Alltagsgeschichte has provided still another analytic framework for the study of gender and war. In her recent history of German and Austrian societies under Nazi dictatorship, Elissa Mailänder characterized Alltagsgeschichte as “giving great importance to quotidian forces and proximate relations of power which all too often lay in obscurity.”2 This terrain of the “everyday” is where the historians Maren Röger, Raffael Scheck, and Paula Schwartz stake their claim. They focus on sexual relations and small acts of resistance under the Third Reich. Their books reveal both the startling possibilities and the enormous challenges these “everyday” histories present. German historians Röger and Scheck focus on transgressive heterosexual relations prohibited by the Nazi state. In Wartime Relations: Intimacy, Violence, and Prostitution in Occupied Poland, 1939–1945, Röger explores a range of intimacies between German soldiers and Polish women, from rape and prostitution to consensual relations. In 1939, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler signed a decree forbidding any kind of sexual intercourse [End Page 150] between Wehrmacht soldiers and Polish civilians. Underwriting this prohibition was the Nazi belief that Poles and other “eastern” people were untermensch, that is, racially inferior to Aryan Germans. The ban, however, contradicted another Nazi belief: that “a virile, soldierly masculinity” depended on regular sexual satisfaction (23). These conflicting aims provided a path for Röger to find the light between policy and practice. Scheck follows a similar agenda in Love Between Enemies: Western Prisoners of War and German Women in World War II. “Frenemies” is what we might call his subject matter: French, Belgian, and British prisoners of war who pursued romantic or sexual relations with German women.3 Again, such contact was prohibited not only by the German military but, in the case of the prisoners of war (POWs), by the Allied armies. According to Scheck, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 POWs were court-martialed for pursuing relations with local women during their captivity. Most of these women were working-class laborers or farmers. If arrested and convicted, they were publicly shamed and sent to prison. French prisoners lived up to their reputation as the Don Juans of Europe, making up eighty percent of these court martial cases. Both Röger and Scheck show enormous invention in ferreting out new kinds of sources for these histories. “More than once, when presenting this project, I was confronted by the question of feasibility,” admits Röger. She refers (without names or citations) to the “many historians” who believed there would be no archival material due to the fact that German soldiers rarely disobeyed the rules (16). Because Polish women who were raped or who served as prostitutes did not want their stories known, Röger could not rely on memoirs or...