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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).
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