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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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"Although 'entanglement' has become a keyword in recent German history scholarship, entangled studies of the postwar era have largely limited their scope to politics and economics across the two Germanys while giving short shrift to social and cultural phenomena like gender. At the same time, historians of gender in Germany have tended to treat East and West Germany in isolation, with little attention paid to intersections and interrelationships between the two countries. This groundbreaking collection synthesizes the perspectives of entangled history and gender studies, bringing together established as well as upcoming scholars to investigate the ways in which East and West German gender relations were culturally, socially, and politically intertwined"--
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This article looks at the transnational impact of two diaries written by the female German journalists Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and Ursula von Kardorff, whose journals shed light on German wartime experiences, resistance activities, and, to a lesser extent, the press. In the postwar years, both journalists sought to influence (West) Germany's relationship with its former enemies, in particular the United States. In their autobiographical writing, they presented both an image of Germany as a victim of Nazism, as well as an early acknowledgment of German crimes. In this way, they achieved a balanced narrative that received a positive reception from American and German audiences. Though the ways in which Friedrich and Kardorff presented aspects of journalism and everyday life in the Third Reich were not unique, their dual identity as women and journalists underlay their ability to act as “legitimate” mediators for Germany's rehabilitation. Western allied occupation authorities and overseas audiences viewed them, in contrast to men, as largely apolitical because they were women, and as objective witnesses because they were journalists. Through their autobiographical writings, both journalists situated themselves among the predominantly male US and German elites devoted to developing amicable relations between the two countries via soft-power diplomacy., Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die transnationalen Auswirkungen zweier Tagebücher, die der beiden deutschen Journalistinnen Ruth Andreas-Friedrich und Ursula von Kardorff. Die Tagebücher sind auch im Hinblick auf deutsche Kriegserfahrungen, Widerstandsaktivitäten und – in geringerem Ausmaß – die Presse aufschlussreich. Beide Journalistinnen versuchten in den Nachkriegsjahren das westdeutsche Verhältnis zu dessen ehemaligen Feinden, insbesondere den Vereinigten Staaten, zu beeinflussen. In ihren autobiographischen Schriften präsentierten sie ein Bild von Deutschland, das selbst Opfer des Nationalsozialismus war, lieferten aber gleichzeitig ein frühes Eingeständnis der deutschen Verbrechen. Dadurch erreichten beide eine ausgewogene Schilderung, die sowohl vom amerikanischen als auch vom deutschen Publikum positiv aufgenommen wurde. Obwohl das, was Friedrich und Kardorff über die Facetten von Journalismus und Alltag im Dritten Reich zu sagen hatten, nicht einzigartig war, trug ihre doppelte Identität als Frauen und Journalistinnen dazu bei, dass man sie als „legitime“ Mediatoren der Rehabilitation Deutschlands ansah. Die westlichen Besatzungsbehörden und Leser in Übersee betrachteten die beiden im Gegensatz zu Männern als weitgehend apolitisch, weil sie Frauen waren, und als objektive Zeitzeugen, weil sie Journalistinnen waren. Durch ihre autobiographischen Schriften konnten sich die beiden Journalistinnen unter den überwiegend männlichen US-amerikanischen und deutschen Eliten etablieren, die mit Hilfe von soft-power Diplomatie freundschaftliche Beziehungen zwischen den beiden Ländern fördern wollten.
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Le présent article s’intéresse, à partir d’une profession stratégique pour le IIIe Reich – les journalistes allemandes –, aux représentations de la violence qui accompagnent la conquête, puis les projets de germanisation nazis, à l’Est. Après avoir présenté l’historiographie d’un champ de recherche en grande évolution depuis deux décennies – celui de la participation des femmes à la violence (exterminatrice) nazie –, les auteurs suivent le parcours de quatre femmes journalistes (Ilse Urbach, Liselotte Purper, Renate von Stieda et Helen Rahms) afin de saisir une éventuelle spécificité féminine à rapporter la violence extrême entre 1939 et 1945.