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

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.