Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  It contradicts none of these principles to observe that German women experienced the war in fundamentally different terms from men. Women did not face death in combat. The proposition that they were by nature weak, gentle, nurturing creatures was far too culturally entrenched to permit even the thought of conscripting German women into the armed forces. In fact, the same proposition was an effective block to the systematic mobilization of women into the industrial workforce; and it accounted for the exclusion of women from the civilian draft that the Auxiliary Service Law sought to impose in late 1916. The precept that women were caregivers, whose proper sphere was the home, proved extraordinarily resilient in Germany, even amid material circumstances that had made mockery of it long before the war.

  Paradoxically, the war encouraged this thinking, as it arranged gender roles spatially, turning the battle front into the performance site of masculinity.44 While the men departed for combat, the women remained behind – on the “home” front – to perform feminine roles. The place of women was perforce supportive. They not only cared for families in the absence of husbands, brothers, and fathers, but – as the war dragged on – they also provided essential material succor for the warriors at the fighting front. In the official symbolism of the war, which was displayed in placards and posters, postcards and poetry, these roles were captured quintessentially in the figure of the nurse, but also the praying mother and the economizing housewife. The feminization of the home front thus inhered in the war’s gendered oppositions, but it was also a social fact: the home front was largely a female phenomenon. Women bore the principal brunt of its privations, and – despite the ideological obstacles to the process – they became an indispensable force in the war economy.

  Generalizations about women in the war are nonetheless risky. Class distinctions bore on women’s experiences of the conflict no less than they did on men’s. While women of all social stations contended with the absence of male heads of household and other loved ones, working-class women faced harsher circumstances as a rule than did women of the higher classes. They were usually poor to begin with, so the departure of a principal provider for the front meant immediate hardship, as these women abruptly found themselves at the head of households. Although they were criticized in some quarters as an invitation to squander money, public subsidies to the wives of soldiers provided a measure of compensation, as did public aid to the families of the poor; but inflation and growing shortages of most basic items made support of a household by a lone working-class woman an increasingly desperate concern.

  Although patriotic appeals and other moral enticements contributed to it, the growing prominence of women in the workforce was thus driven in the end, as it had been before the war, by material hardship. By the end of the conflict over one-third of the industrial workforce was female, and well over 2 million women were employed in factories with more than ten workers. The market, not the state, drove this trend, whose most remarkable feature was the dramatic increase of women in the high-paying war industries, such as the metal-processing plants of the Rhineland and Westphalia, where the number of women in the workforce grew from 19,000 in 1914 to 106,000 at the war’s end.45 In the Krupp works, women made up nearly 40 percent of the workforce.46 The aggregate statistics confirmed the pattern (see Figure 5).

  Figure 5 Distribution of women’s industrial employmentSource: Ute Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft: Beruf, Familie und Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 1989), 47.

  These figures long buttressed the argument that the First World War brought the real beginnings of women’s emancipation to Germany; that it provided millions of women with an essential, rewarding role in the war effort, as well as an opportunity to acquire a sense of occupational identity.47 The argument comported well with the coming of women’s suffrage to Germany in 1919, but it has not withstood recent scrutiny.48 The female industrial workforce grew 17 percent during the war, but prewar trends suggested that it would have grown almost as much had there been no war. The statistics indicate that the war instead occasioned a significant movement among women who were already in the workforce, that women deserted jobs in domestic service or in industries such as textiles and food processing, where they had long constituted a major portion of the workforce, for places on assembly lines that fashioned fuses, shells, and grenades. Labor here was both strenuous and dangerous. An explosion in a munitions factory in Fürth claimed the lives of forty women workers in the spring of 1917; thirty perished in similar fashion shortly thereafter in Cologne. That labor in these circumstances afforded women much sense of occupational identity or fulfillment is doubtful. Owing to the mechanization of weapons production, the employment that they found here often required little training, skill, or responsibility; and they were paid on average about half the wages of their male peers. Many of these women found adjustment difficult to the regimentation of labor in the war industries, where they could expect to work fifty-five hours a week. The army established child-care facilities for them in more than 800 of the larger armament factories, but the support that these facilities provided was scarcely adequate; the 700,000 women workers in these factories shared the services of 630 nurses.49 Finally, virtually all the women in the war industries understood well that their employment would terminate the moment the men returned from the front.

  Even so, women in the war industries enjoyed the highest wage rates among all women workers, and their lot improved in the later stages of the war, as they joined trade unions in increasing numbers – to the point that they constituted one-quarter of the Socialist unions’ membership in 1918. As a rule, women who worked in other sectors, like male workers in these sectors, earned significantly less. Women in textiles earned on average only about two-thirds the wages of women in metal processing. Most vulnerable were the women who populated the domestic industries that took on new life in the war economy. These women, many of whom were wives of soldiers, did piecework as subcontractors to the army, producing baskets, belts, and other items for military use. In Constance, to cite one example, 2,000 of them produced sandbags and canvas strips as subcontractors to a local textile firm.50 Despite its low pay, many working-class women preferred this mode of employment, for it kept them close to home, where the ordeal of feeding, clothing, and otherwise supporting their households consumed much of their time.

  It is more difficult to generalize about middle-class women during the war, for their work experiences were more diverse and less publicly supervised (hence less accessible to statistical review). Many of these women were compelled to join the workforce, too, though not generally on the factory floor. Clerical positions in sales or secretarial work continued, as they had before the war, to offer more suitable employment opportunities for middle-class women, who had now also to fend financially with inflation and the departure of male providers. The war itself created additional opportunities for these women, above all in nursing, both at home and near the front; but many found a demand for their clerical skills in the local public bureaucracies that oversaw rationing systems and other social services.

  The war also offered opportunities to women who did not need to supplement their household incomes. Wealth softened the anxieties of these women about feeding and clothing their families, for it bought easier access to scarce goods. Their servants stood in line for purchases that were legal, and the black market was available for purchases that were not. Adult daughters from these families turned to nursing. Women of the upper middle classes had long been anchors in Germany’s many charitable associations, whose local networks comprised women’s clubs of assorted confessional and political colorations. These groups had traditionally provided care for unwed mothers, orphans, alcoholics, and other categories of unfortunate people. The war opened vast new challenges to women’s charitable organizations, whether Catholic, Jewish, feminist, or nationalist; and it transformed their status. Often in conjunction with the Red Cross, they came together in towns and cities to offer their help to beleague
red local officials, who were grateful to accept. Christened the “National Women’s Service,” alliances of women’s organizations thereupon began to oversee all manner of services, including hospitals, soup kitchens, child-care centers, classes in running a frugal household, and agencies for collecting old clothing and shoes. In Mannheim, the alliance comprised seventy-two different women’s organizations, which oversaw, among other things, 600 children of working women in twelve childcare centers.51 In Berlin, the participating organizations in the National Women’s Service provided the city government with 1,400 volunteers.52 These activities turned private associations in these cities and elsewhere into semi-public corporations. Their members received at most nominal pay for their work, but they now participated in public authority and administered public money. Their public contribution was essential, and it raised problems. The spectacle of women in prominent public roles was as novel to these women as it was to the men who formally supervised them, so the energy and enthusiasm with which women performed these roles became a frequent source of exasperation and jurisdictional friction. Nurses performed more familiar but nonetheless essential functions in the treatment of the sick and wounded; even so, they could not escape the supervision of male physicians and hospital administrators. Nevertheless, terms such as “emancipation” and “fulfillment” were not entirely incongruous to the wartime experience of women who, like Johanna Bungert, one of Meta Scheele’s fictional “women at war,” lent their services to the national effort.53

  The war affected the relations between women and men in other, more basic ways. It resulted in the long-term, if not permanent, separation of millions of men and women who had been in sexual relationships, or would have entered them. The impact registered in the statistics (see Figure 6). A flurry of quick marriages accompanied the beginning of the war, some of them products of impulse, others calculated to qualify a new bride for public subsidies. The rates of marriage and births thereupon dropped precipitously for the duration of the war. Conjugal intimacies were confined to letters, where they were exposed to the censors’ gaze, or to furloughs home.

  Figure 6 Marriages and births Source: Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft, 129, 135.

  The war did not suspend sexual relations, however, either at the front or at home. It encouraged instead its own regimes, which challenged the polarities that had traditionally ordered gender roles. That the fighting front, the realm of male aggressiveness, required an institutionalized outlet for masculine sexual drives seemed self-evident. The presence of millions of German soldiers thus turned prostitution into a massive industry near the front in Belgium, France, and Poland. Brussels, Lille, Antwerp, and other cities were home to hundreds of public bordellos, as well as to countless “free” prostitutes, who were easy to find in the notorious estaminets or coffee houses of the region. The military authorities made no effort to discourage prostitution, for they themselves subscribed to conventional stereotypes and believed in its benefits for the morale of the soldiers under their command. They were alarmed only by the venereal disease that the institution made rampant.54 Fearing the degeneration of the army’s fighting strength, they attempted to regulate the producers. They shut down the more informal avenues of prostitution and tried to confine it to the public houses, which were supervised medically. Their efforts to regulate the consumers of prostitution were more controversial. They ordered the medical inspection and supervision of soldiers who visited the bordellos, as well as a campaign to educate soldiers in safe practices, including the use of contraceptive devices. These efforts quickly drew protests from home, however, from women who pointed out that the army was promoting infidelity among married soldiers.

  Male infidelity at the fighting front threatened conventional thinking about sexuality a great deal less than did female infidelity on the home front. The dimensions of this problem were impossible to determine statistically, but images of the faithless Kriegerfrau, the soldier’s adulterous wife, were ubiquitous – the subjects of jokes and cartoons, as well as serious commentary.55 These images were too widespread to lack foundation. They spoke in all events to deep anxieties, which had to do with the dichotomies that underpinned several orders of relationships. The motif of betrayal challenged the supportive bond that ordered relations between home and the battle front. The images spoke in addition to visions of sexual disorder, the reign of aggressive sexuality among German women. Visions of social disorder were at play, too, for promiscuity, prostitution, and the public display of sexuality were conventionally associated with women of the working class (who were not featured in the official symbolism of the war). While these visions fed on home-front prostitution, which flourished in places, such as Düsseldorf, where soldiers were barracked or paused in transit, the most disquieting image was accordingly the adulterous Kriegerfrau from the middle class, whose passive sexual purity was supposed to be the mark of her social station.56 The circumstances of war encouraged these anxieties, which commonly focused on women’s invasion of the workplace, the presence of French and Russian prisoners of war among the women who worked on German farms, and that perennial dark figure, the Schlafgänger, the male lodger who provided a welcome supplement to the household income but then joined the family in other ways. He represented but one of the many ways the war impinged on family life, however.

  Generations

  The term “generation” refers to social groups that were not, like class or gender, marked out by social space but, instead, by social time. Members of generational groups had the timing of their births in common; hence they shared experiences of events at comparable stages in their natural lives. Like class and gender, however, generations were constructed culturally. Not only the attributes of generational categories, such as “youth” and “old age,” but their very definitions were dependent on the same cultural codes that governed – and wed them with – understandings of class and gender.

  The First World War was a defining generational moment. Age conditioned the experience of war in many ways. It forged a “front generation” out of millions of German males who were born during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.57 Age also impinged centrally, if less dramatically, on the experience of Germans who were younger and older than those whose age qualified them for the journey to the front.

  Close to 10 million Germans were born between 1902 and 1918. In 1916 more than half the civilian population in Germany was under the age of eighteen, though this population of young people was significantly smaller than projected. The war itself shrank the population of the very young. The precipitous fall in the birth rate during the war was the principal cause of this demographic event, but manifold privations also encouraged the deaths of infants who did find their way into that troubled world. The statistics on infant mortality reflected the hazards of malnourishment and exposure that awaited them (see Figure 7). The sharp rise in the curves at the end of the war registered the impact of an influenza epidemic, which added to the ordeal of Germans, adults as well as children, in the summer and fall of 1918.

  Figure 7 Mortality, ages one to fiveSource: Rudolf Meerwarth, Adolf Günther, and Waldemar Zimmermann, Die Einwirkung des Krieges auf Bevölkerungsbewegung, Einkommen und Lebenshaltung in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1932), 58–9.

  For German children who survived the risks of infancy, the war was a comprehensive, overpowering experience.58 It inhabited all the spaces of childhood and youth – in school and at play, as well as in the home. At every level of education, the war and its ferocious patriotic priorities took over the curriculum, commanding instruction in mathematics and natural science no less than in history, geography, German, and religion. One early byproduct of this phenomenon, which was encouraged by both the initial euphoria of national community and the departure of many schoolteachers for the army, was a new degree of curricular flexibility and liberalization in teaching methods. Popularly connoted in the term “war pedagogy,” the new approach emphasized the relevance and civic imperatives of the
war, encouraging children to read and discuss newspapers and other current accounts of the great events, and to express themselves in autobiographical essays and free compositions.59 Common pastimes quickly became additional vehicles for self-expression among young people in wartime. Popular games, such as “hide and seek” and “cowboys and Indians” (which arrived in Germany via the stories of Karl May), adapted easily to martial motifs, while toy weapons, tin soldiers, nurse dolls, and board games with military themes became playthings of choice.

  The freedom and self-expression of young people were not unalloyed benefits, however, particularly once they began to drift towards defiance of adult authority amid the neglect that was another, more general byproduct of the war. The war diminished the attentions, resources, and numbers of adults who would in normal circumstances have provided nurture and supervision to young people. Children were the principal victims of the food shortages, for their bodies most wanted the vitamins and proteins supplied in foods, such as milk and fruits, that were in critical scarcity. The war deprived most families of an adult male, so children grew up in the company of females, who in 1915 made up 58 percent of all German households. In working-class families, adult females were frequently occupied outside the household as well, so the responsibilities of childcare fell to older siblings or cooperative daycare centers.