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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.