Postwar West Research Articles

Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany.

Robert G. Moeller is the first historian of modern German women to use social policy as a lens to focus on society's conceptions of gender difference and woman's place. He investigates the social, economic, and political status of women in West Germany after World War II to reveal how the West Germans, emerging from the rubble of the Third Reich, viewed a reconsideration of gender relations as an essential part of social reconstruction. The debate over woman's place in the fifties was part of West Germany's confrontation with the ideological legacy of National Socialism. At the same time, the presence of the Cold War influenced all debates about women and the family. In response to the woman question, West Germans defined the boundaries not only between women and men, but also between East and West. Moeller's study shows that public policy is a crucial arena where women's needs, capacities, and possibilities are discussed, identified, defined, and reinforced. Nowhere more explicitly than in the first decade of West Germany's history did, in Joan Scott's words, politics construct gender and gender construct politics.

Protecting Mother's Work: From Production to Reproduction in Postwar West Germany

In early 1953, Ursula Mayer learned that her boss, Heinrich Putzkaul, wanted to fire her. His reasons were legion. He charged that Mayer had abused her position of authority as manager ofthe movie theater that he owned. She had transformed her small apartment in the theater part of her wages in kind into a love nest in which she entertained young men both after work hours and even during screenings. The small dachshund that she had purchased, ostensibly to keep her company during solitary evenings, not only yapped audibly during performances but also, according to Putzkaul, left his tracks in the projection room, in the connecting office, and in the theater itself. Since the projectionist refused to clean up after the dog, Putzkaul had been forced to undertake this task himself. These were only the latest incidents in the alleged history of Mayer's insubordination. Her record of conflicts with her employer dated back at least to the previous year when, during the carnival days before Lent, she had used the theater's sound system to play dance music and had cavorted around the stage. Her boss could take it no longer; he needed her apartment immediately for her

Political Man in Postwar West German Education

As GERMANY LAY in ruins after the collapse of Hitler's Third Reich in 1945, thinkers and planners on both sides of the Atlantic asked themselves what it was about the country that had produced and nurtured this Nazi beast, and how a postwar Germany could prevent its re-emergence. The diagnosis varied. One prominent theme-the one that would ultimately prevail when the Western powers encouraged the Germans in their occupation zones to build a West German federal republic--stressed the restoration of pre-Nazi institutions and processes. These had worked well enough, the proponents of this argument asserted. The fault lay in technical weaknesses that enabled Hitler and his gang of upstarts to usurp power and initiate a National Socialist social revolution that, had it been permitted to endure, would have resulted in an extensive restructuring of German society. A second prominent theme saw in the destruction of Nazism and the imposition of foreign occupation an opportunity to carry through another kind of social revolution. Some few wanted the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, a people's republic such as those emerging in the Eastern European states under the control of the Red Army. More, however, were interested in creating the social basis for the realization of liberal democracy: effective equality of opportunity and guarantees of civil rights; the creation of governmental institutions and processes that recognized both the fact and the legitimacy of social conflict among competing social groups; the need for institutions and processes that would bring this social conflict out into the open and permit its mutually satisfactory resolution by pluralistic elites; and a culture stressing the public virtues of responsible participation in social affairs rather than the private virtues of the intellectually and morally righteous man.2 The battle between those wanting enlightened restoration and those wanting reform was carried out in many arenas. Perhaps in none was it so bitterly fought as in the field of education. For some it was sufficient to purge schools at all levels of Nazi influences, to restore them to the standards of excellence existing in Weimar Germany and the century before its creation. There were certainly few who could quibble with the excellence of the classical humanism taught in these schools. For others, however, it was precisely this classical hu-

Rightist Extremism in Postwar West Germany

Rightist Extremism in Postwar West Germany

Rightist Extremism in Postwar West Germany

Rightist Extremism in Postwar West Germany