What Did You Do in the War, Mutti? Courageous Women ... - iSites

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti?
Courageous Women, Compassionate
Commanders, and Stories of the
Second World War
Robert G. Moeller (University of California-Irvine)
Ten years after the end of the Second World War, West Germans were ready
to see it fought again on the silver screen. In her analysis of the blockbuster
Heimatfilm, Grün ist die Heide, Heide Fehrenbach reminds us that the war
was often an implicit background in many West German movies. Even when
there were no gunshots or falling bombs, the war and its consequences
remained ‘part of an unportrayed past. Like a natural catastrophe, it has
no author but unsettling repercussions.’ 1 But a decade after the shooting
had stopped, there were plenty of explosions in West German cinemas,
and film directors were ready to portray the war at the front in all its glory.
War films defined one of the most popular genres of the 1950s. In a decade
when Germans went to the movies more than ever before, over 10% of the
films they could see were about the Second World War. 2 Against the
My thanks to Frank Biess, Uta Poiger, Lynn Mally, and in particular, Heide Fehrenbach, for
helping me to make this article better. I am also indebted to the anonymous referee and the journal
editors for their comments and encouragement.
1
Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after
Hitler (Chapel Hill, 1995), p. 153.
2
Richard C. Helt and Marie E. Helt, West German Cinema Since 1945: A Reference Handbook
(Metuchen, 1987), p. 8; Eric Rentschler, ‘Germany: The Past That Would Not Go Away’, in William
Luhr (ed.), World Cinema Since 1945 (New York, 1987), p. 217; and Knut Hickethier, ‘Der Zweite
Weltkrieg und der Holocaust im Fernsehen der Bundesrepublik der fünfiziger und frühen sechziger
Jahre’, in Michael T. Greven and Oliver von Wrochem (eds), Der Krieg in der Nachkriegszeit: Der
Zweite Weltkrieg in Politik und Gesellschaft der Bundesrepublik (Opladen, 2000), pp. 93 112;
Hickethier, ‘Krieg im Film—nicht nur ein Genre: Anmerkungen zur neueren Kriegsfilm-
Diskussion’, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 75 (1989), pp. 39 53; and Bärbel
Westermann, Nationale Identität im Spielfilm der fünfziger Jahre (Frankfurt=Main, 1990),
pp. 30 95. In general see the useful discussion of some of the war films in Wolfgang Becker and
Norbert Schöll, In jenen Tagen ... Wie der deutsche Nachkriegsfilm die Vergangenheit bewältigte
(Opladen, 1995), esp. on Kinder, Mütter und ein General, pp. 102 5; also Reinold E. Thiel, ‘Acht
Typen des Kriegsfilms’, Filmkritik, 11 (1961), pp. 514 19; Micaela Jary, Traumfabriken Made in
Germany: Die Geschichte des deutschen Nachkriegsfilms 1945 1960 (Berlin, 1993), pp. 156, 175;
German History Vol. 22 No. 4 10.1191/0266355404gh322oa # 2004 The German History Society

564 Robert G. Moeller
background of ongoing debates over West German rearmament, the Federal
Republic’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and early
signs of the economic prosperity that suggested that the post-war years were
coming to an end, films about the war outlined ways in which West Germans
sought to understand this traumatic past and make it an acceptable part of
their contemporary history.
War stories are classic narratives of male heroism, valour, bravery, and
courage leavened with pathos, suffering, and even tears. West German films
depicted fun-loving enlisted men who often reluctantly put on the uniform,
whose first loyalty was to their loved ones and each other, and whose worst
enemies might often be superior officers who were supposed to be on their
side. They showed men who had been filled with a belief in Führer and
Fatherland but quickly learned that they and their country had been
betrayed by the Austrian upstart. And they portrayed men of principle
who were caught between their dislike—even hatred—of National Socialism
and a sense of honour that prevented them from questioning even those
orders they knew to be bad. 3
Not surprisingly, films about the war differentiated sharply between front
and home front. In most films, women minded the hearth, as they dodged
the bombs, cleared away the rubble, comforted children, longed for loved
ones, and orchestrated romantic interludes when men enjoyed brief leaves.
And in some cases, women of dubious morality and compromised patriotism
proved unfaithful to those risking their lives in uniform. The shooting
war was, however, a man’s world.
Robert G. Moeller, ‘‘In a Thousand Years, Every German Will Speak of This Battle’’: Celluloid
Memories of Stalingrad’, in Omer Bartov, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Nolan (eds), Crimes of
War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, (New York, 2002), pp. 161 90; and Peter Reichel,
Erfundene Erinnerung: Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater (Munich, 2004), pp. 83 98.
Also useful is Helmut Peitsch, ‘Towards a History of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: East and West
German War Novels of the 1950s’, Monatshefte, 87 (1995), pp. 287 308. By the late 1950s, war films
also included treatments of POWs in the Soviet Union. See Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The
Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001), pp. 148 68. For
comparative perspectives on the genre elsewhere in the 1950s, see John Ramsden, ‘Refocusing
‘‘The People’s War’’: British War Films in the 1950s,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 33
(1998), pp. 35 63; Denise J. Youngblood, ‘Ivan’s Childhood (USSR, 1962) and Come and See
(USSR, 1985): Post-Stalinist Cinema and the Myth of World War II,’ in John Whitclay Chambers
II and David Culbert (eds), World War II, Film, and History (New York, 1996), pp. 85 96; Jeanine
Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (New York, 1986); and John Bodnar,
‘Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America,’ American Historical Review, 106 (2001), pp.
805 17. In part, West German filmmakers simply followed the lead of their American counterparts.
The popularity of films like the Twentieth Century Fox production The Desert Fox (1951), a celebration
of Erwin Rommel, and Anatole Litvak’s Decision Before Dawn (Entscheidung vor Morgengrauen)
(1951), a story of the end of the war on the western front, and the critically acclaimed
Austrian Yugoslav co-production, Helmut Käutner’s Die letzte Brücke, provided clear indications
that the war could be successful at the box office.
3 For example, 08=15, Parts I and II (Directed by Paul May, 1954 and 1955); Canaris (Directed by
Alfred Weidemann, 1955); and Des Teufels General (Directed by Helmut Käutner, 1955).

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 565
Kinder, Mütter und ein General (KMG) a film that premiered in February
1955, was a giant exception to this rule, and it offered a very different
description of what Mutti had done in the war. 4 In this article, I want to
describe briefly the story that the film tells. And then I want to discuss
why I think this film can offer us insights into how West Germans viewed
the Second World War ten years after it had ended. KMG also provides
compelling evidence of how memories of the Second World War became a
part of West German discussions of rearmament, military reform, women’s
rights and responsibilities, and the positive traditions on which the post-war
Federal Republic could build. An analysis of the film can suggest how reflections
on the war became a medium through which West Germans could
better make sense of their present.
A brief word on method is important. I am not a film theorist, and my
skills as a literary critic are limited at best. This article offers no analysis
of KMG in terms of its narrative structure, the form of its rhetorical address,
or the director’s use of film technique and cinematographic effect to communicate
specific emotions and messages. Rather, I approach KMG as a fascinating
primary source for understanding the early history of the Federal
Republic, and in particular the ways in which West Germans came to terms
with the legacy of the Second World War. With few exceptions, social and
political historians of Germany in the period after the Second World
War—the group to which I pledge my allegiance—have tended to pay little
attention to films as a source, leaving this domain to students of film and cultural
studies. 5 Film theorists, in turn, have tended to view the films of the
1950s with scepticism, because they are aesthetically and cinematically
uninteresting, easily relegated to the margins as an unfortunate way station
between the ‘blood and soil’ of Nazi cinema and the artistic breakthrough
associated with the ‘Young German Cinema’ of the early 1960s and the proclamation
that the ‘old film [was] dead.’ 6 Whatever their artistic merits, however,
films from the 1950s belonged to a popular culture that offered
intriguing commentaries on the Nazi past and suggested how this past could
be selectively incorporated into the West German present. Read together
4 Kinder, Mütter und ein General (Director: Laslo Benedek; Producer: Erich Pommer). Translations
from the German are my own. Special thanks to Paul Reichl and Stefanie Löster of Taurus
Film, who made a copy of the film available to me.
5 I have been particularly influenced by Fehrenbach’s groundbreaking work in Cinema in a Democratizing
Germany. Also extremely instructive is the work of Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels:
Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, 2000).
6 An extremely important exception is Johannes von Moltke, who has added much to the discussion
of popular films in the 1950s by bringing together approaches from film theory and a deep
knowledge of historical context. See, for example, ‘Heimatfilm als Horrorfilm: Rosen blühen
auf dem Heidegrab (1952)’, WerkstattGeschichte, 11 (2002), pp. 82 99; and ‘Trapped in America:
The Americanization of the Trapp-Familie or Papa’s Kino Revisited’, German Studies Review, 19
(1996), pp. 36 66. His book, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema, is forthcoming.
On the ‘Young German Cinema’ and the relationship of this movement to the films of the
1950s, see Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, pp. 221 4.

566 Robert G. Moeller
with other sources, including, but by no means limited to contemporary film
review, films can illuminate larger social and political trends in the Federal
Republic a decade after the end of the Second World War.
The Text
First, the film. KMG was a film adaptation of a popular page-turner by
Herbert Reinecker who made a living churning out melodramas in a different
key under the Nazis. Without losing a beat he emerged in the 1950s, plying
his trade for the mass market in a democratic, not a fascist, Germany.
Reinecker, whose works in the early 1940s included Panzer nach vorn!, the
stirring story of the triumphant Wehrmacht heroes who rolled over Poland,
and Pimpfenwelt (World of [Nazi] Youth), 7 was ready by the early 1950s to
‘get rid of heroism’: Hau ab mit dem Heldentum was the title of the serialized
story first published in QUICK, a weekly illustrated magazine with a circulation
of 685,000; the story became a more prosaic KMG when it appeared as a
novel in 1953. 8 Reinecker was the screenwriter for the film version.
The film’s producer was Erich Pommer, known to film aficionados as the
organizational inspiration responsible for such films as The Cabinet of
Doctor Caligari and The Blue Angel and a driving force behind the German
‘art film’ of the 1920s. Pommer had chosen to sojourn for about a year in
Hollywood in 1926 and returned involuntarily to the United States in
1933 when it became undeniably clear that as a Jew he would find little work
with Ufa, the big German film production company to which he had contributed
so much in the previous decade. Pommer was in Germany once
more in 1946, this time as an American citizen in an army uniform, charged
with helping to rebuild the German film industry in the American zone of
occupation. A decade later—now as a civilian—he was still there, looking
for good stories that would draw big audiences and potentially attract foreign
distributors. Pommer was unwilling to work with former Ufa directors
who had served Goebbels, and for KMG he enlisted the Hungarian expatriate
Laslo Benedek, who had also established a name in Hollywood.
Benedek’s credits in America included a well-received film version of Arthur
Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Wild One with Marlon Brando. The
Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel put Benedek in the elevated company of Vittorio
de Sica, Billy Wilder, and Max Ophuls, praising him as a director
7 Herbert Reinecker, Panzer nach vorn! Panzermänner erzählen vom Feldzug in Polen (Berlin, 1940);
Reinecker, Pimpfenwelt (Berlin, 1940).
8 Herbert Reinecker, Kinder, Mütter und ein General (Darmstadt, 1953). Circulation figures for
QUICK are from Alex Schildt, Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘Zeitgeist’ in der Bundesrepublik
der 50er Jahre (Hamburg, 1995), p. 130. According to public opinion surveys, about
one-fifth of the West German population saw QUICK or Stern, a competitor with a circulation
of 328,000, on a weekly basis.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 567
who only made a film ‘when it really has something to say.’ 9 Benedek
explained that he was now drawn to a ‘film for the youth, for the mothers,
a film for humanity.’ 10 He was ready to film young men, not in leather
jackets, the uniform of the motorcycle gang, but in the field grey of the
Wehrmacht.
Pommer and Benedek assembled an impressive cast. Among the mothers
was Hilde Krahl, familiar to audiences from her work in films during the
Third Reich and a favourite with the illustrated magazines because of her
marriage to Wolfgang Liebeneiner, the head of the Nazi film agency from
1943 45, who had emerged unscathed from the Third Reich to become a
prolific West German director. 11 Joining Krahl was Therese Giehse, a well
known stage actress. A native of Munich, she had spent the years of
National Socialist rule in Zurich, where in 1941 she had been Bertholt
Brecht’s original Mother Courage. Giehse left Germany as Hitler came to
power because her political satire in a Munich cabaret, the Pepper Grinder,
made her persona non grata with the Nazis, but even changing her political
tune would not have altered her Jewish identity. She returned to Germany
after the war, reprising her Brechtian role at the opening of the Berliner
Ensemble—the so-called ‘Brecht Theater’—in that part of the former capital
of the Reich that was now the capital of East Germany. For Brecht, she was
‘the greatest actress in Europe,’ 12 and when Pommer recruited her for KMG,
she was recognized as one of the leading lights of postwar German theatre.
Playing the general was Ewald Balser. Like Giehse, he was well known for
his theatrical work: he had played the role of General Harras, the central
character in Carl Zuckmayer’s play Des Teufels General, an amazingly popular
postwar drama depicting the struggle of a Luftwaffe commander torn
between on the one hand his love of flying and his loyalty to Germany, and
on the other his hatred of the Nazis. 13 Taking orders from Balser in KMG
9 ‘Laslo Benedek: Ein Dirigent der Schauspielkunst’, Der Tagesspiegel (17 April 1955). This and all
other press materials related to the film come from the collection of the Deutsches Filminstitut in
Frankfurt (hereafter DFI).
10 Ernst von der Decken, ‘Benedek dreht morgen: In der Heide entsteht jetzt der Film ‘‘Kinder,
Mütter und ein General’’, Welt am Sonntag (10 Oct. 1954).
11 ‘Abenteur einer Film-Ehe’, Weserkurier (8 April 1950); Walter Anatole Persich, ‘Hilde Krahl
filmt jetzt wieder: Ihr Leben an der Seite Wolfgang Liebeneiners’, Westfalen Zeitung (20 Aug.
1954); and ‘Liebreiz und grosser Stil’, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (10 Jan. 1992) (an obituary). See also
Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918 1945, trans.
Robert Kimper and Rita Kimber (New York, 1996).
12 Benjamin Heinrichs, ‘Therese Giehse oder Lob der Dialektik: Die Münchner Schauspielerin
wird am 6. März 75 Jahre alt’, Süddetusche Zeitung (3 March 1973); and ‘Die Ausserordentliche:
Zum Tod der Schauspielerin Therese Giehse’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (5 March 1975);
Reinhard Kill, ‘Zum Tod von Therese Giehse: Mutter Courage’, Rheinische Post (5 March 1975);
and in general, Therese Giehse, ‘Ich hab nichts zum Sagen’: Gespräche mit Monika Sperr (Munich,
1973).
13 ‘Vaterfigur des Theaters: Zum Tode des Schauspielers Ewald Balser’, Frankfurter Neue Presse
(18 April 1978); and ‘Viele Helden und ein Spieler: Zum Tod von Ewald Balser’, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (14 April 1978).

568 Robert G. Moeller
was Bernhard Wicki, the commander at the front. Wicki—a well-known
actor and later director of Die Brücke, one of the best known West German
war films—had also starred in Helmut Käutner’s Die letzte Brücke, a war
film that came out of a German Yugoslavian collaboration a year before
KMG opened. In 1955, he would also appear as Count von Stauffenberg
in Es geschah am 20. Juli, playing the leader of the unsuccessful military conspiracy
to assassinate Hitler. 14 Beyond the principals, the cast also featured
such talent as Maximilian Schell, who won an academy award six years later
for defending Burt Lancaster on trial as a Nazi judge in Judgment at Nuremberg,
and Klaus Kinski, who had appeared in Morituri (1948), one of the few
postwar German films to take the concentration camp victim as its central
focus, and Decision Before Dawn, an American film about Germans who
are recruited as anti-fascist spies late in the war, in which Kinski had a small
role as the ‘whining soldier.’ 15 No other West German war film could boast
such a formidable group, even if the lines they spoke often came in unadulterated
form out of Reinecker’s pulp fiction.
Reinecker’s tale begins in March 1945. The film opens with scenes of an
idyllic rural landscape—dotted with storm clouds. Military music and the
sounds of gunfire in the background give way to French horns and the music
of the Heimat. The battle front and the home front are not all that far apart.
Arriving at a train station ‘east of Stettin’, Frau Helene Asmussen, a
radiantly blonde, somberly dressed Hilde Krahl, emerges into the midst of
chaos as refugees fleeing the approaching Red Army push their way on to
the train from which she exits. She has only one thing in mind—locating
her son, a schoolboy who has been moved here from Stettin because of
the bombs falling on that city. Immobilized by clueless personnel in the train
station, Helene is rescued by a force of nature, Giehse’s Mutter Bergmann,
the working-class wife of a mechanic, who is also in search of loved ones—
two sons who have been removed to the same boarding school. Mutter
Bergmann takes no flak and states her case forcefully: ‘We want to get
our sons, that’s all.’ When she and Helene finally locate the school, they discover
that it has been transformed into a barracks, a foreshadowing of what
has become of their boys. Helene and Mutter Bergmann quickly learn that
together with others from the school, their loved ones have left that morning,
not in beanies and blazers but in Wehrmacht uniforms, off to the front
and the defence of the Vaterland. Echoing the original title of Reinecker’s
14 See Klaus Kreimeier, ‘Die Ökonomie der Gefühle: Aspekte des westdeutschen Nachkriegsfilms’,
in Hilmar Hoffmann and Walter Schobert (eds), Zwischen Gestern und Morgen: Westdeutscher
Nachkriegsfilm, 1946 1962 (Frankfurt=Main, 1989), pp. 24 27; also Wilhelm Roth, ‘Ein Darsteller
mit Gestaltungskraft: Gedanken zu Filmen des Schauspielers Berhard Wicki’, in Robert Fischer
(ed.), Sanftmut und Gewalt: Der Regisseur und Schauspieler Berhard Wicki (Cologne, 1991),
pp. 53 8.
15 On Kinski, see http:==www.klaus-kinski.de=default.htm. And on Morituri, see Peter Pleyer,
Deutscher Nachkriegsfilm, 1946 1948 (Münster, 1965).

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 569
page turner, Mutter Bergmann angrily denounces heroism as she surveys the
Nazi slogans that adorn the walls of the boys’ former dormitory room.
By now Mutter Bergmann and Helene have been joined by four other
women—a young woman, Inge (Beate Koepnick), the picture of innocence,
dispatched by her parents to bring home her brother, and three more mothers,
including the wife of a minister, a chain-smoking doctor (Ursula Herking),
and a seamstress, all of whom are seeking sons. The group is the female counterpart
to the socio-economically diverse mix of decent German men who
invariably appeared in other war movies from the 1950s, unlikely comrades
who transcend class differences and end up a coherent fighting unit. In
KMG, motherhood and filial love also define a community that bridges the
class divide. Under the command of Mutter Bergmann—this troop’s general—the
women pledge not to return home until they have found the boys.
As millions of Germans head west in advance of the Red Army, the six
women head east—by freight train, advancing with the help of the goodhearted
half-drunk driver of a military truck, on foot—finally arriving at
Wehrmacht headquarters at the front (Figure 1). One commanding officer
confronts another: Mutter Bergmann tells the monocled general, representative
of a noble military élite that has clearly not been infected by the
Figure 1: Mutter Bergmann (Therese Giehse) confronts the General (Ewald
Balser).
Courtesy of Schorcht-International Filmproduktion and the Deutsches Filminstitut.

570 Robert G. Moeller
disease of National Socialism, that she cannot share his pride in the courage
and accomplishment of his young recruits. ‘Proud? What do you mean,
proud?’ she explodes. ‘I’m not proud, not even a little. We want to bring
them home, nothing more.’ But it is too late. The boys have been assigned
to defend a key post against the oncoming Red Army. The general is happy
to have any soldier who can aim a rifle, and the boys have filled this manly
bill. Even communicating with them will not be easy, because at the front,
the exasperated general explains, confusion reigns. Such arguments do nothing
to convince Mutter Bergmann who leaves no doubt that this war is not
of her making. ‘I’ve always kept my mouth shut, like all women have kept
quiet, although they are affected by it most.’ The time for silence has passed.
Exasperated, unsettled, and tipped off balance by his counterpart, the general
wonders out loud how he can give orders while he thinks about mothers.
‘No general in the world can do that!’ But General Bergmann has no sympathy
for his dilemma. She and her troops will not take no for an answer,
and they are off for the little village where the boys have put their fingers
in a leaking dyke, soon to crumble under the pressure of the red flood.
Stopping for the night at an abandoned pub, an oasis in a desolate war-torn
landscape, the women create domesticity in the midst of disorder, settling
down for the night after sharing their meagre provisions. They are not the
only ones in this deserted wasteland, however, as they discover when they
are joined by a band of battle-weary soldiers, the dregs, mustered at the last
minute to hold off the Russians. Led by a wild-eyed lieutenant ‘who no longer
laughs’ (a youthful Klaus Kinski), an Iron Cross around his neck, their number
includes a distracted enlisted man (Maximilian Schell) whose gaze fixes
immediately on the décolletage of the sister, the youngest of the women’s
troop. When he whispers that she should meet him outside for a midnight rendezvous,
it is obvious that she will not live out his fantasies. Later that night,
however, after soldiers and mothers have divided their quarters, ‘the soldier
who no longer can’, 16 as he is described in the film’s publicity materials, is
caught by the sentry, dressed in civilian clothing and preparing to desert. Confronted
by these unpleasant facts, the lieutenant has no choice but to dispense
summary justice, and off-screen, the sound of machine gun fire announces
that in March 1945 there is no time for the niceties of a military tribunal.
The next day, the women descend to yet another rung of the hell that war
is (Figure 2). They pass a row of bodies, not sleeping, as one mother speculates,
but dead, and when they finally reach the village where the boys
are stationed, it is a scene of devastation—levelled buildings, ruins, destruction.
They are, however, at the end of their quest. In an interview with the
commanding office, Captain Dornberg (Bernhard Wicki), Helene takes
the lead, and it is immediately apparent that in some circumstances, a good
haircut and a shapely calf may be more effective weapons than Mutter
16 Publicity materials from the distribution company, Schorcht, DFI.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 571
Figure 2: The mothers arrive at the front. Mutter Bergmann (Giehse) leads the
troop. Helene Asmussen (Hilde Krahl) is second from the left.
Courtesy of Schorcht-International Filmproduktion and the Deutsches Filminstitut.
Bergmann’s steely gaze and squat physique. Mothers and sons, sister and
brother, are soon reunited, but Bergmann discovers that one of her boys
is dead. The women are also shocked to discover how much their loved ones
have changed. Not yet men but no longer boys, their speech rings with the
slang of the barracks and boasts of ‘taking out’ or ‘doing in’ Russians.
Helene learns from Dornberg that he would be happy to have ‘only such
good men.’ The boys have left their innocence behind.
Even in the midst of war, heterosexuality is alive and well. The doctor, a
woman of few words whose short haircut, trousers, nicotine habit, and unmarried
status evoke the ‘new woman’ of Weimar more than the mother of the
Nazis’ fatherland, goes to work in the sick bay immediately, practicing her craft
and even simulating soothing maternal arts to a delusional young man who
thinks she really is his mother. 17 The military physician whom she assists (Rudolf
Fernau) sees in her a ‘lot of love,’ and despite her denials, her smile suggests that
beneath a crusty surface a romantic heart may softly beat. With her, the army
doctor can let down his guard, admitting that he longs for the ‘true sleep ...
17 On the ‘new woman’ of Weimar, see Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement
for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920 1950 (New York, 1995).

572 Robert G. Moeller
Figure 3: The unmarried doctor (Ursula Herking) works side by side with her
Wehrmacht counterpart (Rudolf Fernau).
Courtesy of Schorcht-International Filmproduktion and the Deutsches Filminstitut.
and peace’ of death, and her celebration of the sanctity of life sends his war
weariness running (Figure 3). 18 The sister, ogled earlier by the hapless enlisted
man, immediately attracts the attention of the good-natured corporal charged
with feeding Dornberg’s troops. Left by the war with a gloved prosthetic device
where once there was flesh and bone, the ‘corporal with the wooden hand’
(Claus Biederstaedt) sees in her a hope for the future and the possibility that life
might one day consist of more than ‘eating, sleeping, and drinking’ (Figure 4).
Love is also in bloom in Captain Dornberg’s quarters, where Helene has
retreated for one final attempt to convince him to release the boys. She confesses
that she has already lost her husband to the war and pleads with Dornberg to
spare her son. Dornberg also has a tale of loss. He reveals to Helene that in
Russia, he had to abandon his best friend, left behind with other wounded
comrades and armed only with Dornberg’s service revolver. Unable to fulfill
his final request—to be shot by Dornberg, allowing his mother to know that
he did not meet his end at the hands of barbarous Russians—Dornberg is forced
18 There is an interesting parallel with Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s 1958 film, Taiga, another film based
on a page-turner by Herbert Reinecker. This time, the doctor is Ruth Leuwerik, one of the biggest
box office favourites of the decade. She has been dispatched to care for German soldiers languishing
in a Soviet POW camp somewhere ‘behind the Urals.’ See Moeller, War Stories, pp. 155 60.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 573
Figure 4: The ‘corporal with the wooden hand’ (Claus Biederstedt) dishes up
charm to Inge (Beate Koepnick), a sister in search of her brother.
Courtesy of Schorcht-International Filmproduktion and the Deutsches Filminstitut.
to abandon him, knowing that he will kill himself before the Russians reach him.
‘Since then I have been lost, somehow lost.’ Helene wants to save her boy, but it
is now clear that she can also save this man, and when dawn breaks, though fully
dressed lest the sensibilities of the film rating board be offended, they rest
together on the captain’s bed and enjoy a cigarette. A little imagination goes
a long way, and Reinecker’s novel fills in the blanks explicitly. Dornberg, once
lost, is now clearly found. In the middle of the war, muses Dornberg, ‘it’s forbidden
to be happy.’ But having broken that rule of warfare, Dornberg is now ready
to defy other orders (Figure 5).
The Russians are coming! As Red Army tanks roll in, some of the boys fall to
pieces as they face a war they never imagined. When Dornberg wanders past
them as they catch a few moments’ fretful sleep on a haystack in the midst of
the carnage of war, he has had enough. Surrounded by ‘Ivan’, Dornberg
announces that they will break through the enemy lines and retreat, a ‘rational’
course of action because he ‘can no longer simply sacrifice more men,’ although
he realizes that this step violates his irrational orders to hold his position at all
costs. The mothers have won the battle, and, Dornberg admits, ‘behind every
soldier, I am starting to see the woman who bore him.’ Only one of the
boys—Helene’s fanatical son—protests a departure by ‘night and fog,’ but his

574 Robert G. Moeller
Figure 5: Helene Asmussen (Krahl), intent on saving her son, also rescues
Captain Dornberg (Bernhard Wicki).
Courtesy of Schorcht-International Film produktion and the Deutsches Filminstitut.
outbursts appear on the margins. The focus is on the exchange of fond looks and
terms of endearment—between the sister and the one-handed corporal, who
urges her to seek refuge at his parents’ home in Westphalia, away from the
Red Army and Allied bombs, and between Dornberg and Helene—as both
couples steel themselves for the present by looking toward the future.
The retreat is successful, but now Dornberg must face the military music.
The general asks if ‘it’s the appearance of the women that has so confused’
Dornberg. They got to him too, he concedes. They both know ‘that this war
is lost, it’s only a matter of weeks, horrible weeks and nothing can change
the outcome.’ Yet ‘we cannot simply leave the law behind, not you, not I,’
the general adds, and the exigencies of military order demand that Dornberg
face a court martial.
The film added a coda to Reinecker’s novel. As Dornberg exits, a troop of
news photographers enters, intent on presenting a different face of the ‘war
to the finish’ (Endsieg). The Nazi propaganda machine wants to put the boys

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 575
on the front page and in newsreels, the films of the 1940s that KMG now
critically revisits. The general approaches the ‘men of Dornberg’s fighting
group,’ but he stumbles over the formulaic paean to wartime heroism,
unable to mouth words he no longer believes. The empty ritual is disrupted
by explosions and gunfire, the camera cuts to Red Army tanks on the move,
and the real war resumes. The general needs every man; Dornberg is saved
from one sentence to serve another at the front, but glances exchanged with
Helene as he heads out make clear that he has much to live for.
Benedek and Reinecker told two different stories of how the film ended for
the boys. In the original version, they too were mustered again, rushed off to
the front. But the film’s distribution company worried that such an unhappy
ending was too bleak and would keep audiences away. The weekly news magazine
Der Spiegel, reporting on the making of the film, described the ‘hardheaded
negotiations in which the director Benedek and the writer Reinecker
threatened to remove their names’ from the film. Pommer, still under contract
to the company for three more films, brokered the compromise. Although a
‘trial screening’ of both endings in front of ‘press and radio journalists, housewives,
businessmen and politicians’ led to a vote for the ‘negative conclusion,’
another focus group of twenty, mustered by the distribution company, opted
for letting the boys stay with their mothers. 19 Although the original version
played when the film was shown outside Germany, producer, director, and
writer agreed that at the end of the film in the Federal Republic, the boys were
not to be sent off to face the Red Army. In West Germany, the ending was at
least a little happy. A battle-weary enlisted man tells the boys to go with their
mothers. The front that needed them was at home.
Not all critics praised KMG, but even those who were disappointed by the
substitution of ‘the formula of the illustrated magazine and the successful
film production’ for scenes from ‘real life’ gave Benedek and Reinecker high
marks for taking on a ‘theme that is provocative and valid for all times.’ 20
Others praised the film’s ability to represent the past with ‘decisive realism’,
a stunning indication that ‘recently, German films have become much
better’ 21 and called Benedek’s work the ‘most creative war film yet made
in Germany’. 22 A Protestant watchdog group, the Evangelische Filmgilde,
named the film the ‘film of the month’ in February 1955 when it premiered.
Giehse won the National Film Prize, special recognition for her performance.
And outside West Germany KMG drew critical acclaim, winning
the Grand Prize of the Belgian Union of Cinema Critics (Grand Prix de
19 See Wolfgang Jacobsen, Erich Pommer: Ein Produzent macht Filmgeschichte (Berlin, 1989), pp.
158 61; also Walter Bittermann, ‘Der Krieg im Saale’, Rheinischer Merkur (29 April 1955); and ‘Der
versöhnliche Ausklang’, Der Spiegel (9 March 1955). On the film’s distributor, Kurt Schorcht, see
Manfred Barthel, So war es wirklich: Der deutsche Nachkriegsfilm (Munich, 1986), pp. 54 9, 261.
20 Friedrich A. Wagner, ‘Realismus und Routine’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (21 March 1955).
21 Georg Hensel, ‘Frauen in der Hauptkampflinie’, Darmstädter Echo (9 June 1955).
22 ‘Die Revolte der Mütter’, Stuttgarter Nachrichten (4 June 1955).

576 Robert G. Moeller
l’Union de la Critique de Cinéma) and a Golden Globe Award from the
Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 1956. 23
Yet the film made no money, and it did not attract huge audiences in West
Germany. Production costs had escalated because of the distributor’s
demand for two endings, and Pommer convinced no one that a dubbed
English-language version would draw viewers in the United States. The film
was a commercial flop. During the filming, Pommer pronounced that ‘if this
[film] doesn’t make it, then I’ll give up. Then I’ll just make comedies.’ 24
Pommer was not entirely true to his word, but after KMG he made no more
films in Germany, retreating to the United States where he spent the rest of
his life. It is tempting to conclude—with Pommer’s son, John—that the film
failed because of the distributor’s faint-heartedness and unwillingness to
advertise it aggressively or place it in large numbers of cinemas, cautious
responses to the shift in public opinion in favour of rearmament and West
German entry into NATO. The same papers that carried reviews of the film
also reported on the West German parliament’s final deliberations of the
treaty with the western Allies that would put Germans in uniform and
end the Allied statute of occupation, elevating West Germany to the status
of a sovereign nation. The film’s tough anti-war message, Pommer the
younger speculated, was not in tune with public opinion, and a spineless distributor
was ready to take a loss on a potentially controversial film. 25
A highly critical review of KMG in the left-wing newspaper Unser Tag
offered quite a different analysis, excoriating the film’s makers for producing
a film that would have delighted the Nazi high command. The film’s depiction
of the heroic working-class figure Mutter Bergmann notwithstanding,
the paper’s reviewer concluded that ‘poor Goebbels would not have passed
up this hymn of praise to the brave soldiers, true to their oath, who fought to
the last ounce of blood.’ A winner for Hitler’s propaganda minister, the
reviewer continued, the film would also find favour with Theodor Blank,
the man who headed the office in Adenauer’s government charged with
shaping the new West German army and completing the ‘rehabilitation of
the German soldier’ and the chancellor’s choice as West Germany’s first
Minister of Defence. Just one more example of the ‘invasion of films in uniform’,
charged the critic, KMG joined a wave of war films that had accompanied
the rearmament drive. By failing to equip its viewers ‘with a weapon
against war’, the film ill-served the mothers to whom it was dedicated.
Unsuited to educate or illuminate, the reviewer concluded, it was in ‘no
23
Ursula Hardt, From Caligari to California: Erich Pommer’s Life in the International Film Wars
(Providence, 1996), p. 196; and Handbuch für evangelische Filmarbeit, Gruppe I=b=2, February 1955,
copy in DFI.
24
‘Erschütternder Passionsweg der Frauen’, Duisburger Generalanzeiger (30 Oct. 1954).
25
Hardt, From Caligari to California, pp. 195 6; also Sabine Hake, German National Cinema
(London, 2002), p. 97.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 577
way suited to remove the blinders that many mothers still wear.’ 26 Accomplishing
this goal required the kind of anti-fascist education on offer in the
German Democratic Republic, not least in films produced by the staterun
film company DEFA. 27
In this paper, I argue that neither Pommer’s biggest fan nor his most outspoken
critic got it right. To his son, I would respond that even good box
office cannot tell us much about audience response, and a producer’s and
distributor’s commercial failure can be a historian’s goldmine. As for the
left-wing critic, Bonn was not Weimar, as Fritz René Allemann declared
in 1956, and it was certainly not the Third Reich, despite communist claims
that there was little difference between Hitler’s Germany and Adenauer’s. 28
Hitler’s propaganda minister would never have approved a film that sent
women to the front, even if it was their sons, not they, who bore arms,
nor would he have endorsed a film that praised captains who disregarded
the orders of superior officers.
So where in between does the truth lie? Let me offer a response by focusing
on the story that KMG tells—a story that already had attracted a broad
readership in illustrated magazines and in novel form, a story that had
won some modicum of official favour by obtaining government financial
support and securing the use of West German border troops and British
tanks when it was made into a film, and a story that received much positive
press. It was a story, I maintain, that did much more to affirm than contest
how most West Germans had come to understand the meanings of the end
of the Second World War by the middle of the 1950s. Far from unequivocally
challenging pressures for West Germany to rearm, it suggested ways
in which the men who would put on uniforms in 1955 could draw on traditions
and values that had allowed them to resist Nazi indoctrination and
were amply displayed by those who unwillingly put on the Wehrmacht uniform
in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The right sort of army would never
initiate a war. KMG also indicated how West German memories of the war
were shaped by the postwar development of the Federal Republic. The story
the film told was as much a commentary on a reconstructed Federal Republic
ten years after the war’s end as it was on a Germany nearing defeat in the
spring of 1945.
26
‘‘‘Kinder, Mütter und ein General’’: Einer aus der Invasion uniformierter Filme’, Unser Tag (27
July 1955).
27
See, for example, Christiane Mückenberger, ‘The Anti-Fascist Past in DEFA Films’, in Sean
Allen and John Sandford (eds), DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946 1992 (New York, 1999),
pp. 58 76; and Detlef Kannapin, Antifaschismus im Film der DDR: DEFA-Spielfilme
1945 1955=56 (Cologne, 1997).
28
Fritz René Allemann, Bonn ist nicht Weimar (Cologne, 1956).

578 Robert G. Moeller
The Contexts
To illuminate these themes, I want to locate this film in the context of
broader postwar discussions of how best to reconstruct Germany, focusing
in particular firstly on the amazing vanishing Nazi, and the ‘clean’
Wehrmacht; secondly, on militant maternalism and the ‘new woman’ of
the Adenauer era; and thirdly on mothers, fathers, and ‘citizens in uniform’
or how rearming West Germany was a family affair.
Context One: The Amazing Vanishing Nazi and
the ‘Clean’ Wehrmacht
There is little to dislike about the men in uniform who appear in KMG. In
some films from the mid-1950s, nasty Nazis abound, caricature cut-outs
who are immediately identified by their fanaticism, their willingness to sacrifice
innocent men, their ability to send others into battle while remaining in
safety, and their complete lack of any sense of humour. 29 But in KMG there
is not a single Nazi in sight. Uniformed chests are adorned with iron crosses,
not swastikas. The closest the film ever comes to a true believer is Harald
Asmussen, Helene’s son, who holds on to an idealistic faith in Führer and
Fatherland until the bitter end. However, even his zeal is more youthful
hot-headedness than conviction, and the looks Dornberg and his mother
exchange at the end of the film suggest that in a reconstructed family, Harald
will learn different lessons.
In telling the war’s end in this fashion, the film did not challenge, rather, it
confirmed, how most West Germans had come to view Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
For most West Germans, putting soldiers on trial at Nuremberg immediately
after the war was proof positive of the Allies’ misunderstanding of National
Socialism and the zealous pursuit of conceptions of German ‘collective guilt.’
Post-war public opinion polls revealed that only a handful of those Germans
questioned believed that soldiers deserved any particular condemnation. 30
Many had ‘served’ (gedient), and those who had not were unlikely to accuse
male relatives who had worn a uniform. For postwar West Germans, the
Allies failed to see who was victim, who perpetrator, of crimes against
29 See, for example, Moeller, ‘‘‘In a Thousand Years’’’
30 Jay Lockenour, Soldiers as Citizens: Former Wehrmacht Officers in the Federal Republic of
Germany, 1945 1955 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 2001), p. 27; also, Jörg Echternkamp, ‘Arbeit am Mythos:
Soldatengenerationen der Wehrmacht im Urteil der west- und ostdeutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft,’
in Klaus Naumann (ed.), Nachkrieg in Deutschland (Hamburg, 2001), pp. 421 44; Echternkamp,
‘Von Opfern, Helden und Verbrechern: Anmerkungen zur Bedeutung des Zweiten Weltkriegs in
den Erinnerungskulturen der Deutschen 1945 1955,’ in Jörg Hillmann and John Zimmermann
(eds), Kriegsende 1945 in Deutschland (Munich, 2002), pp. 301 16; Echternkamp, ‘Wut auf die
Wehrmacht? Vom Bild der deutschen Soldaten in der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit,’ in Rolf-Dieter
Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann (eds), Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität (Munich, 1999), pp.
1058 80; and on the Nuremberg trials, Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and
the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford, 2001), pp. 21 2, 41 2.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 579
humanity. Decent men, forced to execute irrational orders, were also victims
of the Nazis. KMG moved a step beyond most war films by also addressing
the shattering effects that war could produce. But even the tortured executor
of military justice—Kinski’s lieutenant ‘who can no longer laugh’—is no
Nazi. Rather, he has been pushed to the limits by circumstances beyond
his control. In a different Germany, he too could have kept his sense of
humour.
By the early 1950s, the western Allies who were among the most aggressive
prosecutors at Nuremberg, charging the German military at the war’s
end, had also backed away from their condemnation of the Wehrmacht. A
few years—that included wars in Korea and French Indo-China and the
fears that a European Cold War could easily become hot—made a big difference.
In 1945, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in
Europe, publicly maintained ‘that the Wehrmacht, and especially the
German officer corps, had been identical with Hitler and his exponents of
the rule of force,’ 31 perpetrators of the same crimes, subject to the same
penalties. Less than six years later, Eisenhower and the Allies had moved
dramatically away from this global indictment; soldiers and Nazis could
not be lumped together. In an official statement, hammered out by West
German representatives and the upper echelons of the US forces of occupation,
Eisenhower now averred that ‘there is a real difference between the regular
German soldier and officer and Hitler and his criminal group.’ ‘The
German soldier as such,’ Eisenhower assured West Germans, had not ‘lost
his honor’; the ‘dishonorable and despicable acts’ committed by a handful of
individuals should not reflect on the overwhelming majority of Germans
in uniform. The soldiers of KMG confirmed Eisenhower’s observation and
corroborated what most West Germans already believed. 32
The Cold War and the sharp division of the world between East and West
explain Eisenhower’s change of heart. By setting its action ‘east of Stettin’
KMG immediately invoked this larger geopolitical context. Stettin was not
just one more former German city, now ‘under Polish administration,’ as
the West German atlases of the 1950s noted; 33 it was a terminal point on that
line that stretched to Trieste, defining the ‘iron curtain’ that Winston
Churchill had described descending ‘across the Continent’ in the famous
1946 speech that marked the onset of the Cold War. As one of Dornberg’s
men explains to the boys, ‘War is filth, nothing but filth. Those who lose the
31
Quoted in Donald Abenheim, Reforging the Iron Cross: The Search for Tradition in the West
German Armed Forces (Princeton, 1988), p. 70.
32
Quoted in ibid., p. 70; see also David Clay Large, Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament
in the Adenauer Era (Chapel Hill, 1996), pp. 114 17; and on the background in the late 1940s,
Roland G. Foerster, ‘Innenpolitische Aspekte der Sicherheit Westdeutschlands (1947 1950)’, in
Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Anfänge westdeutscher Sicherheitspolitik, vol. 1, Von
der Kapitulation bis zum Pleven-Plan (Munich, 1982), pp. 403 576.
33
JRO Weltatlas: Handausgabe, prepared under the direction of Ernst Kremling (Munich, n.d.
[1953]).

580 Robert G. Moeller
war know that, they remember it. In no time at all, those who win forget.’
This is the lesson that ersatz fathers are able to tell on the eastern front in
March 1945, and a decade later it is the cautionary tale that losers in
KMG offer the winners of the Second World War as Soviets and Americans
faced each other on the front line of the Cold War. Post-war German
youth—and postwar superpowers—had much to learn from chastened
fathers who returned home from the war sadder but wiser. 34
Veterans of the eastern front, however, also understood that war and militarized
vigilance were not the same thing. In the final debate over German
rearmament—which took place in late February 1955 as KMG opened in
West German cinemas—Heinrich von Brentano, the leader of Adenauer’s
party, the Christian Democrat Union, who would become Foreign Minister
in June, stressed that Soviets had not ended the war, rather, they had continued
it with other means by blockading Berlin and expanding into Korea
and Indo-China. Public opinion polls indicated that a majority of West
Germans closely followed these parliamentary debates, and the public was
remarkably well-informed about the foreign affairs that shaped West
Germany’s future. 35 Those who best understood the perils of war—and its
potentially perilous legacies—had a particular obligation to keep the peace,
and as soon as the ‘western world appeared tired or lacked determination,’
Brentano predicted, the Soviets would ‘make the move from the Cold War
to a hot war.’ 36 The enemy in 1945—in the backyards and gardens of the
abandoned village Captain Dornberg attempts to defend—was the enemy
West Germans confronted in 1955 in the backyard of the Cold War Federal
Republic.
KMG affirmed other popular memories of the war’s end, which provided
variations on the theme of what distinguished soldiers from Nazis. According
to the vernacular memory of the war, 37 those most vocal in affirming
34
Heide Fehrenbach, ‘Rehabilitating Fatherland: Race and German Remasculinization’, Signs,24
(1998), pp. 107 27; Robert G. Moeller, ‘‘‘The Last Soldiers of the Great War’’ and Tales of Family
Reunions in the Federal Republic of Germany’, ibid., pp. 129 45; Moeller, ‘Heimkehr ins Vaterland:
Die Remaskulinisierung Westdeutschlands in den fünfziger Jahren’, Militärgeschichtliche
Zeitschrift, 60 (2001), pp. 403 36; Frank Biess, ‘Survivors of Totalitarianism: Returning POWs
and the Reconstruction of Masculine Citizenship in West Germany, 1945 1955’, in Hanna Schissler
(ed.), The Miracle Years: a Cultural History of West Germany (Princeton, 2001), pp. 57 82.
35
Michael Geyer, ‘Cold War Angst: The Case of West-German Opposition to Rearmament and
Nuclear Weapons’, in Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years, pp. 380 1; Georg Meyer, ‘Innenpolitische
Voraussetzungen der westdeutschen Wiederbewaffnung’, in Alexander Fischer (ed.), Wiederbewaffnung
in Deutschland nach 1945 (Berlin, 1986), pp. 31 44; Hans Ehlert, ‘Innenpolitische Auseinandersetzungen
um die Pariser Verträge und die Wehrverfassung 1954 bis 1956’, in
Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Anfänge westdeutscher Sicherheitspolitik, 1945 1956,
Vol. 3, Die NATO-Option (Munich, 1993), pp. 235 560.
36
Verhandlungen des Bundestags (Bonn, 1955, hereafter VDB), 2. Wahlperiode, 72. Sitzung, 27
Feb. 1955, p. 3881.
37
I borrow the formulation from Peter Fritzsche, ‘Volkstümliche Erinnerung und deutsche Identität
nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Konrad Jarausch and Martin Sabrow (eds), Verletzte Gedächtnis:
Erinnerungskultur und Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt (Frankfurt=Main, 2002), pp. 75 98.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 581
Goebbels’ call for a fight to the finish in the eastern provinces of the Reich
had left long before the Soviets advanced, abandoning ordinary Germans to
hold off the enemy for as long as possible. In these memories of the end of
the war on the eastern front, it was opportunistic party bosses, the ‘gold peacocks,’
38 identified by their highly decorated uniforms, who postponed evacuation,
mouthing pronouncements of German victory while failing to add
that the Red Army was at the gates, then fleeing to save themselves, leaving
their subordinates behind. Leading Nazis who had condemned as traitors
those who questioned the Führer’s will emerged as the biggest traitors of
all. They are an absent presence in KMG. Reinecker and Benedek do not
have to name them for viewers to know that real Nazis were once there
but have long since vanished, leaving it to real Germans in Wehrmacht uniforms
to hold off the Red Army. When the mothers first confront the general,
they find him poring over maps, studying the Heimat he seeks to
defend. He knows the war is lost, but he also knows that in the ‘horrifying
weeks’ to come, his ability to delay the enemy’s advance will determine how
many Germans escape Soviet terror.
In other war films of the 1950s, at least some generals are true believers,
but in KMG, even the commanding officer cannot bring himself to mouth
empty propagandistic platitudes. On the walls of his office are a barometer
that registers the stormy weather blowing westward and sombre oil paintings,
not portraits of the Führer. The general, Captain Dornberg, and virtually
everyone else in uniform better fits the description of the historian
Hans Rothfels, who, commenting on 9 May 1945, ‘ten years after’ reminded
West Germans of the courage of soldiers who had experienced ‘the eastern
side of the defeat, namely, the expulsion [of Germans from east central
Europe] and the [territorial] losses, the loss of a thousand year history and
the loss of German unity.’ In an article written for the Vierteljahrshefte
für Zeitgeschichte, the most important new postwar historical journal in
the Federal Republic, Rothfels developed a speech first delivered to students
at the University of Tübingen, who had asked this representative of their
grandparents’ generation to offer his reflections on the meanings of 1945.
Rothfels invoked the memory of those whose ‘struggle, rich with sacrifice,
in the defence of the territory of the Heimat ... was carried out to the end
with a sense of the military duty to fulfil obligations.’ Their efforts only
intensified as illusions evaporated, ‘with no hope of wonder weapons or
armies that no longer existed.’ 39 And in early 1955, millions of West
Germans knew that some ten thousand of them still languished in Soviet
38 ‘Erlebnisbericht der Frau Wilhelmine von Hoffmann aus Reichenberg, Original, Winter
1956=57, 48 Seiten, mschr.,’ in Bundesministerium für Vertriebene (ed.), Dokumentation der Vertreibung
der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, vol. 4: Die Vertreibung der deutschen Bevölkerung aus der
Tschechoslowakei (1957, reprinted Augsburg, 1994), Pt 2, p. 680.
39 Hans Rothfels, ‘Zehn Jahre danach’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 3 (1955), p. 228.

582 Robert G. Moeller
prisoner-of-war camps. 40 Chancellor Konrad Adenauer linked the same past
to the present when he argued for German rearmament by evoking the spectre
of ‘the women and men, deported to serve in slavery [in the Soviet Union]
... and what Soviet Russia committed against poor defenceless men and
women when it advanced into Germany’ in the spring of 1945. 41 KMG told
the same story. At the end of the film, the general sends Dornberg on one
more impossible mission, but viewers did not need Rothfels or Adenauer
to remind them that, in March 1945, delaying the Soviet advance was the
only way to ensure the evacuation of the largest possible number of
Germans. When the general hears that the ‘Russian has broken through,’
he knows what he has to do. He and Dornberg are protecting Germans,
not following orders from Berlin.
At the beginning of the film, the chaotic scene at the train station is filled
with Germans who are doing everything they can to escape, and as the
women proceed to the front, they pass signs of Germans in flight from the
Red Army—abandoned suitcases, overturned cars, the detritus of a
panicked rush westward. Some eight million citizens of the Federal Republic
had fled or been forced from their homes in eastern Europe at the war’s end
and could offer variations of this story. Most West Germans could also
recall that the end of the war in the east was accompanied by massive waves
of the rape of German women by Red Army soldiers, and in popular memories
of the war’s end, no occurrence is mentioned more frequently. 42 Thus,
Dornberg learns from the mothers, but when he returns to the front at the
end of the film, he is also off to defend their virtue. Even in the sanitized version
of the film, destined for domestic consumption, the ultimate fate of the
boys and their mothers remains uncertain. Most viewers would have agreed
with Rothfels that their survival depended on Dornberg’s continued willingness
to defend the Heimat and hold off the Red Army.
KMG communicated the reassuring message that those Germans who
took off the uniform in 1945 were not crazed Nazis. They had fought
because they had to and because they sought to protect the Heimat from
a communist invasion. KMG asked no one to question whether, ten years
later, West German men should be ready to take up arms against the same
enemy, if need be. Interviewed during the making of the film, the director
Laslo Benedek commented, ‘this is no anti-militaristic movie. But it is a
movie against war.’ 43 Nothing in the film suggests that a strong army—
headed by men who listen to mothers, who can shed tears for lost comrades,
40 Moeller, War Stories, pp. 88 122.
41 VDB, [1.] Wahlperiode, 190. Sitzung, 7 Feb. 1952, p. 8098.
42 Moeller, War Stories, pp. 65 7; Elizabeth Heineman, ‘The Hour of the Woman: Memories of
Germany’s ‘‘Crisis Years’’ and West German National Identity’, American Historical Review, 101
(1996), pp. 354 95.
43 Ernst von der Decken, ‘Benedek dreht morgen’.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 583
who know when an order is irrational, but who are also ready to block a barbarian
invasion for as long as possible—need be inconsistent with peace.
Context Two: Militant Maternalism and the ‘New Woman’
of the Adenauer Era
KMG was billed as a tribute to the unsung heroes of every war—the mothers
whose thought and action, whose being aim at sustaining life... What are medals and
titles compared with such courage? ... Mothers are not decorated with medals. There
is no ‘war memorial’ that attests to their sacrifice and courage. But when we think of life
and goodness and love, we have mothers to thank.
Although the film might make uncomfortable those who were ‘sated and
made sluggish by the good life’, unwilling or unable to ‘confront the most
recent past’, it reflected ‘what millions of Germans suffered’ and it was a
powerful reminder that ‘the world of men is not always the home of
humanity.’ 44
In the early postwar years, films had offered other reflections on women’s
experience during the Second World War. Consider Liebe 47, the 1949 film
adaptation of Wolfgang Borchert’s Draussen vor der Tür (translated as The
Man Outside) 45 in which Hilde Krahl—the carefully coiffed Helene
Asmussen of KMG, whose night of passion with Bernhard Wicki allows
the captain to open his heart and make rational decisions—also appears, this
time as Anna Gehrke. Borchert’s script was written in late autumn 1946,
produced first as a radio play in early 1947, then as a stage production the
following November. It was extremely popular, and by the late 1940s it
had become a standard part of the repertoire of theatres throughout the western
Allied zones of occupation. The film version was written and directed by
Krahl’s husband, Wolfgang Liebeneiner. 46 Liebe 47 closely follows Borchert’s
drama in its portrayal of an enlisted man, Beckmann, who returns from
a stint as a POW in the Soviet Union after the war. He is tortured by the
knowledge that by following orders, he sent men under his command to
their death. He is saved by a woman, the survivor of a brutal war at home,
and to Borchert’s story of a male victim Liebeneiner adds the parallel story
of a woman, who is only a marginal presence in the play.
In Liebe 47, Krahl’s character fights her own war. Her husband, who
unquestioningly rushes off to follow the Führer’s orders, filled with imperial
44 ‘Das Hohelied der Mutterliebe’, press material from the distribution company. Copy in DFI.
45 Wolfgang Borchert, ‘Draussen vor der Tür’ und ausgewählte Erzählungen (Hamburg, [1956]
1970). Published in English as The Man Outside: The Prose Works of Wolfgang Borchert, trans.
David Porter (Norfolk, Conn., 1952).
46 Kreimeier, The Ufa Story, pp. 275, 345 46; and in general, on the continuities in directors and
screenwriters from the Third Reich to the Bonn Republic, see Hans-Peter Kochenrath, ‘Kontinuität
im deutschen Film’. in Wilfried von Bredow and Rolf Zurek (eds), Film und Gesellschaft in
Deutschland: Dokumente und Materialien (Hamburg, 1975), pp. 286 92.

584 Robert G. Moeller
fantasies of scaling the Caucasus mountains in a Blitzkrieg, dies in action. As
she leaves Schwerin—part of the same ‘German East’ which is the setting for
KMG—in advance of the Red Army in the spring of 1945, she loses her only
child. Attempting to board a westbound train, she looks on in horror as
another train hits and kills her daughter. She hopes that in the postwar
period things will be better, because ‘we did enough penance in the war.’ These
hopes, however, are quickly dashed, and her struggle for survival becomes no
easier. She manages by working in a cannery where she crams fish into tins, but
she soon learns that she can smell of better things if she deploys her sexuality.
Serial relationships—with a married man and a black marketeer—teach her
that ‘no one needs us women ... they use us.’ Her war and postwar are thus
a ‘hell’ that match Beckmann’s hell at the front and in a Soviet prisoner-ofwar
camp. National Socialism has betrayed them both. The film opens with
Death and God gambling for control of these lost souls, but by the end of
the film, Gehrke has clothed, fed, and nurtured Beckmann, bringing him back
from the brink. In the process, by exercising these feminine powers, she has also
restored herself. Together, woman and man join in a project of salvation and
recovery, and God will help those who have helped themselves. Accepting their
responsibility for each other, they can face the future. 47
By the end of the 1940s, films that so relentlessly presented demolished
urban landscapes and broken lives and raised such difficult questions about
blame and guilt were ceasing to be big draws, leading reviewers to conclude
that audiences were sated with stories that focused only on the ‘hopelessness
of the first postwar years.’ As one reviewer of Liebe 47 put it, it was ‘time
for spiritual restoration. We have had enough of violent emotions.’ 48 There
was plenty of violence and no shortage of emotions in the war films of the
mid-1950s, but a decade after the war, violence and emotion were not linked
to complicated questions of accountability for war crimes, and the spectrum
of war memories—men’s and women’s—addressed in literature, political
discourse and films had narrowed decidedly. In KMG, Wicki is tortured
by whether to follow orders not because he fears responsibility for the
slaughter of innocent civilians by Germans, but because he does not want
47 See Massimo Perinelli, Liebe ‘47—Gesellschaft ‘49: Geschlechterverhältnisse in der deutschen
Nachkriegszeit (Hamburg, 1999); Ulrike Weckel, ‘Spielarten der Vergangenheitsbewältigung:
Wolfgang Borcherts Heimkehrer und sein langer Weg durch die Westdeutschen Medien’, Tel Aviver
Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 31 (2003), pp. 125 61; also Erica Carter, ‘Sweeping up the Past:
Gender and History in the Post-war German ‘‘Rubble Film"’, in Ulrike Sieglohr (ed.), Heroines without
Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema 1945 51 (London,
2000), pp. 91 110; Kirsten Burghardt, ‘Moralische Wiederaufrüstung im frühen deutschen Nachkriegsfilm’,
in Michael Schaudig (ed.), Positionen deutscher Filmgeschichte: 100 Jahre Kinematographie
(Munich, 1996), pp. 246, 264. Gehrke embodies many of the symbolic meanings of ‘woman’
that defined West German national identity in what historian Elizabeth Heineman calls the ‘hour
of the woman’ in Heinemann, ‘The Hour of the Woman.’
48 ‘Überholte Filme’, Wirtschaftszeitung (16 July 1949). In general, see Helmut Peitsch, ‘Deutschlands
Gedächtnis an seine dunkelste Zeit’: Zur Funktion der Autobiographik in den Westzonen
Deutschlands und den Westsektoren von Berlin, 1945 bis 1949 (Berlin, 1990).

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 585
to risk the slaughter of his own men—and, as every West German viewer
would have understood, the rape of German women—by Russians as they
storm westward in the spring of 1945. Anna Gehrke admits that ‘perhaps
women idolized Hitler,’ even if she is quick to add that it was men, not
women, who made war. In KMG, war and Hitler are synonymous, equally
irrational, and women—and for that matter most men—find both
anathema.
The women who arrive ‘east of Stettin’ in March 1945 are also never the
‘woman standing alone’—without a man—a ubiquitous figure in the
immediate postwar years and the woman whom Anna Gehrke represents.
Even the world-weary doctor spies the promise of heterosexual union as
she works alongside her counterpart at the front, and if Helene Asmussen
has lost one man, she’s quickly found another—and with none of the moral
ambiguity that characterizes Anna Gehrke’s dangerous liaisons with the
men who help her to survive the war and early postwar years. 49 The men
to whom the women of KMG are attracted are also not the ‘impotent hero,’
plagued by a ‘eunuch-like lack of sexual desire’, 50 the language used by medical
doctors to describe returning POWs in the late 1940s and the figure that
Beckmann cuts. Throughout the play and the film, Beckmann wears the prescription
glasses from his gas mask, an odd construction held on precariously
by elastic bands, which only highlights his otherworldliness and his
impeded vision; he cannot see properly and the world cannot see him.
Balser, Wicki, the army physician, and the good-natured one-handed corporal
see clearly and demonstrate a red-blooded heterosexuality that six
years of combat has not dulled.
KMG pushed to the side some of the complexity of women’s wartime
experience, but the box into which it placed womanhood—one defined by
maternal instincts—was not only part of the German past; by 1955, it was
a central part of the post-fascist redefinition of womanhood in the West
German present. 51 As KMG appeared in serialized form in the pages of
49 Dagmar Herzog, ‘Desperately Seeking Normality: Sex and Marriage in the Wake of War’, in
Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social
History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 160 92.
50 Hans Malten, ‘Heimkehrer’, Medizinische Klinik, 41 (1946), p. 598, quoted in Frank Biess, ‘The
Protracted War: Returning POWs and the Making of East and West German Citizens, 1945 1955’
(Ph.D. Dissertation, Brown University, 2000).
51 Still other dimensions of women’s wartime experiences never made it onto celluloid. For example,
there was no Roswitha the Riveter in postwar cinema, and the public memory of women in uniform
was extremely short-lived. See for example Gudrun Schwarz, ‘‘‘During Total War, We Girls
Want to Be Where We Can Really Accomplish Something’’: What Women Do in Wartime’, in
Bartov, Grossmann and Nolan, Crimes of War, pp. 121 37; Karen Hagemann, ‘‘‘Jede Kraft wird
gebraucht’’: Militäreinsatz von Frauen im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Bruno Thoss and
Hans-Erich Volkmann (eds), Erster Weltkrieg=Zweiter Weltkrieg: Ein Vergleich. Krieg, Kriegserlebnis,
Kriegserfahrung in Deutschland (Paderborn, 2002), pp. 79 106; Ute Daniel, ‘Zweierlei Heimatfronten:
Weibliche Kriegserfahrungen 1914 bis 1918 und 1939 bis 1945 im Kontrast’, in ibid.,
pp. 391 409.

586 Robert G. Moeller
QUICK and on film screens, West German parliamentarians, policymakers,
medical doctors, judges, lawyers, women and men were busy discussing how
best to reconstruct gender in the aftermath of fascism. The solutions outlined
in debates over the Basic Law (Grundgesetz), the constitutional foundation
for the Federal Republic hammered out in 1948 and 1949, still echoed
some of the themes of ‘rubble films’ like Liebe 47. Elisabeth Selbert, the
Social Democratic representative who most forcefully championed women’s
equality, focused on the immediate context of the ‘woman, who during the
war years stood atop the rubble and replaced men at the workplace, [and]
has a moral right to be valued like a man.’ 52 However, by the early 1950s,
the woman at the centre of sociological analyses, political debates, and
the popular imagination stood in the kitchen, not amidst urban ruins, and
she did her own work as a mother, not the work of men. Overcoming the
tumult of the postwar years meant returning women to their proper place.
This vision of woman at the centre of the postwar family was also
inscribed in the provisions of the Basic Law that ensured the sanctity of
the family as the most fundamental building block of state and society.
Christian Democrats insisted that ‘a nation is worth only as much as the
value it places on the family,’ 53 an explicit criticism of the Nazis’ attempt
to invert the natural order by forcing families into the service of the state
rather than guaranteeing that the state would serve families. The mothers
of KMG made clear how dismally the Nazis had failed. After 1945, no
one questioned that maternal values should be at the centre of reconstructed
families. Even if some Social Democrats placed greater emphasis on
women’s work outside the home, the party never contested a concept of
women’s rights, ‘founded on an equality of worth, which acknowledges difference.’
54 By the early 1950s, Social Democrats were no less committed than
Christian Democrats to a ‘functional division [of labour] in the family, for
which the image is often used of the husband as the ‘head’ and the wife as
the ‘heart’ of the organism.’ 55 The best guarantee of stable families and
strong maternal heartbeats was a male wage that would allow a mother to
work where she was best employed.
52 Parlamentarischer Rat (hereafter PR), Hauptausschuss (hereafter HA), Bonn 1948=49, 17.
Sitzung (3 Dec. 1948), pp. 206 07 (A complete set of these published protocols is in the Bundesarchiv
[Koblenz]). In general, see the discussion in Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood:
Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 38 75;
Elizabeth D. Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi
and Postwar Germany (Berkeley, 1999), pp. 141 45; Erica Carter, How German Is She? Postwar
West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor, 1997), pp. 30 34.
53 Principles adopted by the party in Frankfurt, September 1945, reprinted in Ossip K. Flechtheim,
Dokumente zur parteipolitischen Entwicklung in Deutschland seit 1945, vol. 2, Part 1: Programmatik
der deutschen Parteien (Berlin, 1963), p. 39; see also the party principles of the Christian Social
Union, ibid., pp. 214 15.
54 PR, HA, 42. Sitzung (18 Jan. 1949), pp. 539 51.
55 Nora Platiel, ‘Zur Eherechtsreform’, Gleichheit, 15 (1952), pp. 329.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 587
The woman of the immediate postwar years who justified her equality by
doing men’s work vanished from political rhetoric, and she also ceased to
appear on film screens. Increasingly, the woman of public discourse and public
policy was the woman of KMG—the woman whose claims to power, authority,
and equality with men stemmed from her identity as a mother. The ‘new
woman’ of the 1950s distinguished herself not with a bobbed haircut and an
androgynous look as she had in the 1920s but with her militant maternalism. 56
In a film shot in black and white, reminding viewers of newsreels from the
end of the war and aiming at that stark realism praised by critics, there is
nonetheless an element of the fantastic in the invulnerability of Bergmann’s
troop. All around them, men in uniform fall victim to Red Army snipers,
tank barrages, and artillery fire. The women remain unscathed, clad in the
armour of their moral righteousness. As the publicity materials for the film
proclaimed, ‘mother-love is stronger than all military orders and the rules of
war.’ 57 The basis of a woman’s authority and power—in the political
discourse of postwar West Germany and in KMG—was her identity as a
mother. The ability of mothers to protect their families knew no limits. In
KMG, they even accomplish this task at the front.
The family—and in particular, woman’s place within it—also loomed
large in political debates, film scripts and the public imagination because
it became another battlefield in the Cold War. West Germans defined themselves
in contrast to ‘Russian conceptions’, realized across their eastern border
where equality meant the obligation to work outside the home, and
rejected the ‘socialization of the family.’ 58 Levelling of difference—whether
in the economy or the home—was a Bolshevik vision, not one rooted in
the ‘Christian Occident’ (christliches Abendland). In March 1945, ‘east of
Stettin’, Giehse’s troops are seeking to preserve one aspect of the Abendland,
while Captain Dornberg, the general, and their men fight to hold off the
forces that most threaten it.
Locating women so centrally at the foundation of families also granted
them a particularly vital role in the reconstruction of conceptions of
Germanness after the defeat of National Socialism. Debates over the
family—which invariably focused on the rights and responsibilities of
mothers—became debates over the future of the German nation at a moment
when the rhetoric of nationalism, contaminated by its associations with
National Socialism, was subject to critical examination, and West German
political leaders sought to distinguish ‘genuine’ nationalism from the nationalism
hijacked by the Nazi state. In some of the political formulations of the
postwar period, the German nation that could be redeemed was defined as a
56
In general, see Grossmann, Reforming Sex.
57
‘Das Hohelied der Mutterliebe’, part of the publicity materials produced by the distributor, copy
in DFI.
58
Headline of report of a meeting of Catholic journalists in early 1953, ‘Absage
an ‘‘Sozialisierung’’ der Familie’, Westfalenpost (14 Jan. 1953).

588 Robert G. Moeller
‘community of victims’ who had survived a common fate, the community
that united mothers and military men on the eastern front at the war’s
end, depicted in KMG. 59 Another important placeholder for what defined
Germany was the family. In the politics of the postwar world, in which nation
and nationalism were negatively associated with National Socialism and the
German nation of 1945 was divided into two German states, the search for a
legitimate basis for the Volksgemeinschaft was homeward bound, 60 and the
family was identified as an important repository of values that were German,
not National Socialist. Mutter Bergmann claims that the women of KMG
represent all mothers, but they also represent what is best about Germany
and what has survived more than a decade of the Thousand Year Reich,
ready to serve as the basis for restoration and rebuilding.
The literary critic Amy Kaplan writes that national policy—and the nation—
are characterized as domestic in implict contrast with what is foreign and external.
The familiar—or perhaps familial—is juxtaposed to what is threatening
and unknown. 61 Postwar West Germany provides a fascinating illustration of
this general thesis. An idealized conception of the family—with woman at its
centre—had not been destroyed by the Nazis or falling bombs. The postwar discourse
on the family emphasized that mothers held this structure together. A
substantial body of sociological literature and the rhetoric of parliamentary
debates confirmed that ‘maternal care for the life of future generations’ had sustained
Germany during the war and postwar years, and the great ‘tenacity’ of
the family as a social form was rooted in the ‘biological ground of sexual relations
and a mother’s existential care for the next generation.’ 62 When Mutter
Bergmann confronts the general, she delivers the same message.
59 See Jörg Echternkamp, ‘‘‘Verwirrung im Vaterländischen’’? Nationalismus in der deutschen
Nachkriegsgesellschaft 1945 1960’, in Jörg Echternkamp and Sven Oliver Müller (eds), Die Politik
der Nation: Deutscher Nationalismus in Krieg und Krisen 1760 1960 (Munich, 2002), pp. 219 46.
This is also a central theme in Moeller, War Stories; Moeller,‘Remembering the War in a Nation
of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s’, in Schissler, The Miracle Years, pp. 83 109.
60 See the interesting comparisons suggested by Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American
Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988); and Jane F. Levey, ‘Imagining the Family in
Postwar Popular Culture: The Case of The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen’, Journal of Women’s
History, 13 (2001), pp. 125 50.
61 Amy Kaplan, ‘Commentary: Domesticating Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History, 18 (1994), pp.
97 105. See also Frank Costigliola, ‘The Nuclear Family: Tropes of Gender and Pathology in the
Western Alliance’, Diplomatic History, 21 (1997) pp. 163 83.
62 Helmut Schelsky, ‘Die Aufgaben einer Familiensoziologie in Deutschland’, Kölner Zeitschrift
für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 2 (1949=50), pp. 222 23. Merith Niehuss, Familie, Frau und
Gesellschaft: Studien zur Strukturgeschichte der Familie in Westdeutschland 1945 1960 (Göttingen,
2001), pp. 172 214; Moeller, Protecting Motherhood; Carter, How German Is She?; and Hanna
Schissler, ‘‘‘Normalization’’ as Project: Some Thoughts on Gender Relations in West Germany during
the 1950s’, in Schissler, The Miracle Years, pp. 359 76.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 589
Context Three: Mothers, Fathers and ‘Citizens in Uniform’,
or Why West Germans Should Have Had No Fears
About Rearmament
KMG did not create gender trouble; it located women in a familiar=familial
role as mothers and moral agents. But it did create genre confusion, because
few women—and even fewer mothers—typically appeared at the front in the
combat film. 63 In KMG mothers met generals ‘east of Stettin,’ but there was
also genre confusion in debates over the reform of the German military,
where mothers—at least symbolically—also confronted military men. The
film made clear that those seeking positive military traditions on which to
re-establish a German army need look no further than the eastern front in
March 1945, where German—not Nazi or Prussian—courage and honour
were in abundance. But KMG also insisted that military matters should be
mediated by motherhood, a message that was central to the discourse of
military reform in the early 1950s.
KMG echoed the insistence of postwar feminists that women bore the consequences
of the wars men made. Publicity materials for the film described
women as the ‘real victims of barbarous war. They are the ones who suffer
most from war. Their sons, husband, and brothers are torn from them and
put at the service of the technology that destroys human life.’ 64 In political
63 See the discussion in Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, p. 224. Indeed, I would speculate
that this genre confusion may have been what kept audiences away. Tucked in the pages of an illustrated
magazine, KMG could find a female readership that embraced the tale of valiant mothers of
the serialized novel. But perhaps this message translated poorly into film at a moment when other
war films uniformly located soldiers, not mothers, centre stage, and appealed primarily to the
millions of West German men who had ‘served.’ There is, however, at present virtually no research
that tells us much about the audiences for either films or the illustrated press. On the war stories in
illustrated magazines aimed at a male readership, see Michael Schornstheimer, ‘‘‘Harmlose Idealisten
und draufgängerische Soldaten’’: Militär und Krieg in den Illustriertenromanen der fünfziger
Jahre,’ in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (ed.), Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht
1941 1944 (Hamburg, 1995), 634 50; Schornstheimer, Die leuchtenden Augen der Frontsoldaten:
Nationalsozialismus und Krieg in den Illustriertenromanen der fünfziger Jahre (Berlin, 1995). And
for a rare scholarly treatment of other forms of popular print media, see Lu Seegers, Hör zu! Eduard
Rhein und die Rundfunkprogrammzeitschriften (1931 1965) (Berlin, 2001). And in general, on the
significance of the illustrated press as part of the West German culture of leisure, see Schildt,
Moderne Zeiten.
64 ‘Das Hohelied der Mutterliebe’, part of the publicity materials produced by the distributor.
Copy in DFI. And on postwar feminist critiques of war as a ‘man’s thing,’ see Annette Kuhn,
‘Frauen suchen neue Wege der Politik’, in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Frauen in der Deutschen Nachkriegszeit,
vol. 2: Frauenpolitik 1945 1949, Quellen und Materialien (Düsseldorf, 1986), pp. 11 35; also
Ingeborg Nödinger, ‘Für Frieden und Gleichberechtigung: Der Demokratische Frauenbund
Deutschlands und die Westdeutsche Frauenfriedensbewegung in den 50er und 60er Jahren,’ in
Florence Hervé (ed.), Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Cologne, 1995), pp. 138 54; Gisela
Notz, ‘Klara Marie Fassbinder (1890 1974) and Women’s Peace Activities in the 1950s and 1960s’,
trans. Rebecca van Dyck, Journal of Women’s History, 13 (2001), pp. 98 103; and Irene Stoehr,
‘Cold War Communities: Women’s Peace Politics in Postwar West Germany, 1945 1952’, in Karen
Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds), Home=Front: The Military, War and Gender in
Twentieth-Century Germany (Berg, 2002), pp. 311 33.

590 Robert G. Moeller
debates over women’s rights and responsibilities in the 1950s, however,
women were not absolved from all responsibility, because, noted the liberal
feminist, Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, ‘wars are prepared in the nursery.’
Women bore a ‘procreative duty’ to raise sons the right way, ensuring that
they did not follow a path from the ‘nursery to the battlefield.’ Expressing
emotions that Mutter Bergmann would forcefully second in KMG, Lüders
stressed that it was a ‘fundamental necessity’ for women to care for others
in ways that nature did not demand of men. Men’s naturally greater tendency
toward aggression left it to women to outline paths that did not lead
to war, shaping the Y-chromosome with education and the right sort of
child-rearing methods. 65 As the Social Democrat Emmy Meyer-Laule put
it in parliamentary debates over the reform of the parts of the civil code regulating
parents’ relationships with children, ‘it’s in the children’s room that
the democrat, the citizen, is initially shaped.’ 66
‘I always kept my mouth shut, we women all kept our mouths shut,’
rumbles Mutter Bergmann when she first meets the general, and with her,
postwar West German feminists insisted that particularly when it came to
children’s interests, they would no longer be silent. This agenda was
easily reconciled with plans for rearmament. Advocates of military reform
completely agreed that the education and training of the soldier—who
was first and foremost a homegrown citizen—should begin not in the barracks
but in the bassinet. Mothers had much responsibility for the young
men who would don the uniform. Military service did not make the citizen.
Rather, only a man who was a proper citizen, rooted in the values of family
and community, could be a soldier, a ‘citizen in uniform,’ who was ready to
defend the Heimat but whose naturally bellicose urges were kept in check,
lest he, as Lüders put it, move from ‘military to militaristic.’
Wolf Graf von Baudissin, a former Reichswehr officer who became the
driving force behind the initiative to create the foundations of the reformed
West German army, explained that the ‘militarized citizen’ of the past would
be replaced by the ‘solider as citizen’ of the present. 67 Baudissin insisted that
the young men who made poor soldiers, ‘often lacked the warmth of the
family nest in the decisive years.’ No longer should the army be the ‘school
of the nation,’ the dominant view that had emerged in the nineteenth
65 Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, ‘Kriege werden in der Kinderstube vorbereitet’, Silberstreifen,
1946=4 þ 5 (1), 4, quoted in Kuhn, ‘Frauen suchen neue Wege,’ pp. 27 8; also Heineman, What
Difference Does a Husband Make?, p. 139.
66 Meyer-Laule, VDB, [1.] Wahlperiode, 239. Sitzung (27 Nov. 1952), p. 11060.
67 Wolf Graf von Baudissin, ‘Das Leitbild des künftigen Soldaten’, Die Neue Gesellschaft,
Jan.=Feb. (1955), reprinted in Peter v. Schubert (ed.), Wolf Graf von Baudissin: Soldat für den Frieden
(Munich, 1969), p. 212.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 591
century, 68 rather, families should assume that role, educating citizens who
could wear the uniform. Fathers must play their part, and the paternal qualities
modelled by Wicki in KMG indicated that the men who had returned in
1945 could contribute to this pedagogical project. In the film, there are other
ersatz fathers around. When the boys take refuge in a crumbling building as
the Russians begin their attack, a seasoned veteran comforts one whose
nerves are shot, admitting that ‘we can no longer win.’ When Asmussen,
the fanatical hot-head, charges him with cowardice, he adjusts his coat to
reveal a breast full of medals, letting Asmussen know precisely how little
he understands about the proper relationship of masculinity, valour, and
compassion, values essential to the good solider and the good father.
Given the accepted sexual division of labour and conceptions of an
equality for women that was rooted in biological difference, however, it
was clear that mothers would play an even more important role in shaping
future citizen soldiers. 69 Again, the contrast with that other Germany to the
East was implicit. There, the Free Democrat Martin Euler explained, a ‘formal
equality of rights’ led to ‘permitting women to be pistol-packing mamas
(Pistolenweiber).’ 70 In the West, women should not bear arms, rather, they
should bear—and introduce to the values of democracy—sons who would
become the right kind of soldiers. Not the nation, but home and family were,
in turn, what the soldier would be ready to defend. 71 When the mothers
arrive in their sons’ former dormitory early in the film, they find the walls
inscribed with the Nazi slogan, ‘You are nothing, your nation [Volk] is
everything’, but the film’s message—and a theme running throughout
debates over postwar military reform—was that the nation was only as good
as the families who were its ‘basic cells’. In KMG, domesticity is reconstructed
at the front, ensuring that soldiers will do the right thing and
demonstrating how mothers and the military could join together in pursuit
of common goals.
Advocates of reconstructed postwar families and the reconstructed postwar
army argued that in each, relations among equals should be based on
mutual respect and interdependence, not hierarchy. Baudissin insisted that
68 Karen Hagemann, ‘Der ‘‘Bürger’’ als ‘‘Nationalkrieger’’: Entwürfe von Militär, Nation und
Männlichkeit in der Zeit der Freiheitskriege’, in Karen Hagemann and Ralf Pröve (eds),
Landesknechte, Soldatenfrauen und Nationalkrieger: Militär, Krieg und Geschlechterordnung im historischen
Wandel (Frankfurt=Main, 1998), pp. 74 102; Ute Frevert, ‘Das Militär als ‘‘Schule der
Männlichkeit’’: Erwartungen, Angebote, Erfahrungen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Ute Frevert (ed.),
Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 145 73.
69 Wolf Graf von Baudissin, ‘Probleme politischer Menschenführung in zukünftigen Strietkräften’,
Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 48 (1955), pp. 241 55, reprinted in Schubert, Wolf Graf von
Baudissin, p. 244.
70 VDB, [1.] Wahlperiode, 44. Sitzung (2 March 1950), p. 1490.
71 In general, on the connections among various conceptions of ‘Sicherheit’ in the 1950s, see Hans
Braun, ‘Das Streben nach ‘‘Sicherheit’’ in den 50er Jahren: Soziale und politische Ursachen und
Erscheinungsweisen’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 18 (1978), pp. 279 306.

592 Robert G. Moeller
a reformed army could no longer be structured around models of
‘patriarchal subordination’ and ‘the power of fathers’. In the new German
army ‘partners with the same worth as citizens are on the same level.’ 72
For Adenauer, entry into NATO, rearmament, and the suspension of the
Allied occupation statute were essential to achieving West German’s equal
rights (Gleichberechtigung) in the international arena. ‘We want to be sovereign
in our own country, no longer an object, but a subject of world politics,’
73 the chancellor explained. The relations of equality evoked by
Baudissin and Adenauer were also on display in KMG, where ‘the power
of fathers’ was out of place and where mothers—subordinated to no patriarchs—confronted
the fathers in military command as equals. Giehse,
whose formidable Mutter Bergmann won her praise from critics as a ‘genuine
Mother Courage’, 74 faced the general, Ewald Balser, whose reputation
was as ‘the father figure of the theatre.’ 75 The relations of equality in difference
captured in the film echoed throughout parliamentary debates over the
reform of the Civil Code, which featured a model of companionate marriage
and the partnership of husband and wife, characterized by no ‘patriarchal
subordination.’ The mutual respect required by the new German army could
emerge from a dialogue between fathers and mothers, equal partners in
determining what was best for West Germany’s youth.
In a series of interviews with former officers, published in 1951, Adelbert
Weinstein presented the case for an Armee ohne Pathos that would
scrupulously avoid excessive zeal and ‘excessive ardour’ (Überschwung).
The ‘innere Führung’—which has been translated as ‘inner leadership’,
‘moral leadership’ and ‘moral education’—of the new military forces
described at length by Baudissin should be based on reason, self-control,
and a moral order that filled the individual before the individual filled the
uniform. It was essential to reconstruct the ‘right traditional attitude and
live it the way that suits our times.’ 76 KMG suggested that there was no
shortage of positive traditions on which reformers could draw. Good men
had borne the uniform of the Wehrmacht, but in a democratic Germany,
even the best men needed some help. Mothers—at the core of German
families—were the ones who could provide it.
Among the lessons that mothers had to offer was a keen sense of when it
was rational to violate orders. The men they confront complain that they are
72
Schubert, Wolf Graf von Baudissin, pp. 215 16.
73
Richard Tüngel, ‘Wir sind keine Phäaken mehr’, Die Zeit (7 Oct. 1954), quoted in Ehlert,
‘Innenpolitische Auseinandersetzungen’, p. 270.
74
Dirk Henning, ‘Eine Mutter mit Courage’, Schwäbische Landeszeitung (9 July 1955).
75
‘Vaterfigur des Theaters: Zum Tode des Schauspielers Ewald Balser’, Frankfurter Neue Press
(18 April 1978).
76
Count Wolf Baudissin, ‘The New German Army’, Foreign Affairs, 34, 1 (1955), pp. 1 13, quotation
p. 9, translated as ‘Die neue deutsche Bundeswehr’, in Schubert, Wolf Graf von Baudissin; see
also Large, Germans to the Front, p. 177.

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 593
helpless, unable to alter circumstances beyond their control. For the women
to expect them to challenge these conditions is crazy. Just as irrational is the
very presence of women at the front, and again and again, men in uniform
tell Mutter Bergmann and her band that they have completely lost their
senses. But the women quickly prove that they are not crazy. Rather, the
situation in which they find themselves is insane, and they confront men with
a female rationality that demonstrates even to commanding officers how to
exercise better judgement. In many areas, mothers know best.
In the first variant of the film’s conclusion, unavailable for domestic consumption,
the mothers, left behind, sigh ‘they have forgotten us, they will
always forget us.’ The discourse of West German military reform in the early
1950s made it clear that mothers would not be forgotten. Distinctive female
characteristics defined the basis for women’s claims to an equality grounded
in difference, and it was precisely these characteristics that established their
authority to assist in shaping the men who would defend the nation. Early in
the film, the exasperated general sputters to his subordinate that ‘no general
in the world can be thinking about [mothers]’ while giving the order to
attack, and when he meets Bergmann and the others, Dornberg fumes, ‘I
have other things to do than worry about women.’ But by the end of the film,
military men are listening to what women have to say—just as military reformers
were acknowledging the part that the home would play in shaping the
‘citizen in uniform.’ In debates over rearmament, Adenauer insisted that
‘German militarism is dead’, and Soviet claims that an armed Germany
‘would once more set the world in flames’ were completely unfounded. 77
The mothers of KMG were there to ensure that the military did not become
militaristic and that boys with matches did not get into trouble.
***
War films from the mid-1950s told viewers what they already knew. 78 KMG
did not create completely new frameworks for understanding the Second
World War; rather, it expressed meanings that had evolved since the war’s
end. An analysis of KMG also suggests how reflections on the war became
a medium through which West Germans could better understand their present.
When West Germans told stories about the shooting war that ended in
May 1945 ‘ten years after’, they were also telling stories about the Cold War
that followed. The men who appeared in Wehrmacht uniforms in the films of
the mid-1950s became participants in political debates over whether West
Germans should put on the uniform of the Bundeswehr and become active
members in a Cold War western military alliance. The addition of women
to the story complicated the mix. The maternalism they displayed was
77 VDB, 2. Deutscher Bundestag, 61. Sitzung (15 Dec. 1954), p. 3134.
78 Linda Schulte-Sasse makes the same point about films during the years of Nazi rule. See Entertaining
the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham, N.C., 1996), p. 31.

594 Robert G. Moeller
completely consistent with notions of equality grounded in an acknowledgment
of difference, visions of military reform that began at home, and the
search for German values that could contribute to the definition of a ‘genuine’
postwar nationalism that had successfully survived the Third Reich.
The Mütter of KMG were the women who had resisted Hitler’s war, but they
were also the mothers who shaped Adenauer’s peace.
Abstract
In the mid-1950s, West Germans were ready to fight the Second
World War again, this time at the cinema. This paper analyses
Kinder, Mütter und ein General, a war film in which a band of
courageous women pushed to the eastern front in March 1945 to
bring home their sons who had only just put on Wehrmacht
uniforms. The paper concludes that the film indicates how West
Germans had come to understand the past of the war a decade after
the shooting stopped, and how memories of the war also shaped
contemporary discussions of rearmement, the rehabilitation of the
Wehrmacht, and the redefinition of ‘a women’s place’ after the
defeat of Fascism.