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This article examines the role of local, female propagandists utilized by the German army on the Eastern Front during WWII. Although the work they undertook aligned with postwar notions of collaboration, the propagandists’ experiences at the hands of the Wehrmacht, in a context of a violent war and repressive occupation, constitutes coerced labour in multiple forms. Regardless of the women’s motivations for working for the Wehrmacht, they entered a relationship of domination and dependence with the occupation force. While female propagandists numbered far fewer than their male counterparts, they held a particular importance for German high command who believed that their “feminine” traits, such as empathy and charm, helped the Wehrmacht influence and control the largely female civilian population. At the same time, their work on the frontlines encouraging Red Army soldiers to defect crossed traditional gender boundaries. In this task too, the women were valued for their gender with German authorities believing that Soviet soldiers, largely deprived of female contact, would be particularly receptive to the charm of a woman’s voice. Such coerced labor on behalf of the Wehrmacht rendered these women vulnerable not only to German violence, but also to Soviet accusations of collaboration and its associated reprisals.
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This article uses memoirs, newspapers, and archival documents to analyse how four German women journalists became entangled in ideological conflict between Nazism, communism, and liberal democracy from the 1930s to the 1950s. Using the concept of a ‘long’ Cold War, it demonstrates how from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic of West Germany, the experiences and autobiographical writing of German women journalists who had been arrested and imprisoned by the Soviets contributed to Germany’s national identity as both a victim and a bulwark of (potential) Soviet aggression. Publishing their experiences provided these female journalists with a unique and historically specific political agency: their words echoed contemporary discourses about the supposed communist threat and how women and ideas about women were inherent in such rhetoric.
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This master’s thesis analyses Italian women discourses on their living conditions in the feminine press during the fascist era, from 1922 to 1937. On the basis of three publications, l’Almanacco della donna italiana, La Donna Italiana: rivista mensile di lettere, scienze, arti e movimento sociale femminile and Il Giornale della donna, which will become, in 1935, La Donna Fascista, this study tries to demonstrate that maternity, employment and leisure are all present in the discourses, and that they have been written about openly. It is possible to note an evolution of the feminine points of view with the different events happening at the time, like Matteotti’s assassination and the new work legislation. Journalists share their ideas with multiple techniques. They use the parameters of the fascist regime to justify the role and services to which they pretend, as well as the gendered society division to self-assign some tasks and the ideals carried by the ideology to justify points of view. Therefore, despite freedom of expression restrictions during Benito Mussolini’s regime, women do have some latitude in the discourses related to their living condition, which have the particularity of being written strictly for a female audience. This thesis demonstrates the particularities of women’s discourses in a totalitarian society. To do so, the publication selection has been studied by statistical analysis first to seek out common subjects and journalists, and then by comparative analysis to demonstrate similarities and differences in the topics’ treatment.
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During the 1930s, France was hit by a political, economic, and diplomatic crisis which revealed many divisions in society. French journalists, seeking a solution to the national crisis, showed a particular interest towards their neighbor across the Rhine after the nomination of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on January 30th, 1933. Hitler took advantage of France’s weakness and divisions to question but also oppose and act against the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles until the outbreak of World War II on September 1st, 1939. The objective of this research is to analyze how the French national press reacted to German revisionism from 1933 to 1939. In this context, the press’ perception of Hitler’s actions and how its opinions changed (or not) over time reveals the ways in which French newspapers interpreted events in Germany that affected France itself. By consulting editorials and opinion articles from five daily newspapers of different political orientations, namely L’Action française, L’Humanité, Le Figaro, Le Petit Parisien and Le Temps, this memoire analyse the opinion of the French national press on the revision of the Treaty of Versailles. This study contributes to the historiography of the interwar period and France’s reaction to German aggression in two ways. First, it shows that the press was not blind to Hitler’s revisionist plan. It also demonstrates that the French press remained divided concerning the actions of Nazi Germany until 1939. The protection of the Treaty of Versailles’ clauses and its system, which maintained the balance of power in Europe, polarised the French press and created a weakened national feeling until the outbreak of World War II. German revisionism fuelled the disagreements in the daily newspapers studied from 1933 to 1939.