As the first World War came to an end, more than 14 000 black French soldiers entered occupied Germany.
This was a huge culture shock for the German people who suddenly had to come to terms with a new reality of mixed-race couples, a sexual revolution and the fight for their traditional family values.
How German women coped with the occupying forces, after both the First and Second World Wars, was the subject of a talk by the Rhodes University head of German Studies, Undine Weber, at Friends of the Library lecture on Monday.
Initial reactions, she said, were shock and disgust, which led to widespread discrimination against women who engaged in interracial relations. Children of mixed race couples were called ‘Rhineland Bastards’.
These children were even sterilised by German authorities, since they posed the threat of “diluting the pure German blood,” Weber explained.
The aftermath of World War II was quite similar. Germany was carved up between occupying French, British, American and Soviet forces. It battled to find its identity and how to deal with its tainted tradition. This struggle formed the backdrop to the relations between German women and the occupying forces, both black and white.
This time though, as a result of war casualties, German women outnumbered German men by seven million. Given the shortage of German men, relationships with occupying soldiers became far more common than during the years after World War I.
Since the defeated German soldiers had grown up with the purist Nazi ideology, relationships between German women and the occupiers had a significant effect on them.
They saw it as an act of betrayal by their own people.
Men often saw these sexual relations as German versus non-German, or white versus black. “The German experience of Americans had largely come to present an entity which had injected a foreign culture and a racial Other,” said Weber.
White West-German women who frequented ‘black bars’ were seen as “wilful and willing fraternisers who perpetuated a national betrayal against Germany and German men, in order to indulge their cravings for material and sexual pleasures,” said Weber.
The solution proposed by politicians was to restrain women’s sexuality, which was believed to be the key to stemming the tide of ‘moral decay’. In her talk Weber painted a thought-provoking picture of a defeated nation’s racial and cultural struggle with change.
Additionally, it had to deal with a new kind of femininity, as women who had been a fundamental part of the German war machine were now seen as important for the recovery of the nation both as workers and mothers.
By Brian Dingle
Article Source: Grocotts Mail