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

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.