Preliminary Programme

Wed 23 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 24 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 17.30

Fri 25 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 26 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 23 April 2014 8.30 - 10.30
F-1 SEX13 Sex and `the Other' in Germany and Britain during and after the Second World War
Elise Richtersaal first floor
Network: Sexuality Chair: Christa Hämmerle
Organizers: - Discussant: Peter Becker
Lucy Bland : Interracial Relationships and the ‘Brown Baby’ Problem: Black GIs, White British Women and their Mixed Race Offspring in 2nd World War Britain
This short paper, the beginnings of my new project on the history of transracial adoption in Britain, will attempt to delineate some of potential themes and problems arising from research on the relationships between white British women and African-American soldiers and the mixed-race babies that resulted.
The US entered the war ... (Show more)
This short paper, the beginnings of my new project on the history of transracial adoption in Britain, will attempt to delineate some of potential themes and problems arising from research on the relationships between white British women and African-American soldiers and the mixed-race babies that resulted.
The US entered the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in Dec 1941, and from Jan 1942 GIs started arriving in Britain. From the beginning there was concern about the arrival of black GIs. By the end of the war, of the 1 and a half million to 2 million US soldiers who had passed through Britain, 133,000 were African American. There were various attempts to discourage intimate relations between black GIs and white British women, for example, the War Office, in August 1942, decreed that the British Army should lecture their troops, including the women in the ATS, on the need to keep contact with black GIs to a minimum. It clearly felt the need to be discrete as although it wanted to keep America sweet, and thus was not going to oppose segregation overtly, it didn’t want to disaffect colonial troops on whose services Britain was also very dependent. Although many of the British were horrified by the white GIs’ racist attitudes towards blacks, and stressed British tolerance against the segregation of the American armed forces, they did not necessarily condone intimacy, indeed were often hostile to interracial sex and marriage. While many were committed to being friendly and polite, they drew the line at sexual relations. White women in relations with black men were deemed ‘unpatriotic’. Once babies started to appear the disapproval heightened, for not only were these babies illegitimate, but they were mixed race. The black GIs were forbidden by the military to marry their white girl-friends. While some of the mothers and/or their families kept their babies, many placed them in homes with the object of adoption, such was the stigma of illegitimacy and the burden of racism.
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Elissa Maïlander : For Better or Worse? Narratives of Divorce in Germany, 1945 – 1951
In this paper, I examine the emotional and sexual problems as well as the reconfigurations of marriage in Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Scholars of the history of sexuality have identified a liberal stance towards heterosexuality as a decisive difference between the Nazi ideology and the ... (Show more)
In this paper, I examine the emotional and sexual problems as well as the reconfigurations of marriage in Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Scholars of the history of sexuality have identified a liberal stance towards heterosexuality as a decisive difference between the Nazi ideology and the Christian bourgeois Weltanschauung of Imperial and Weimar Germany. Indeed, those whom National Socialists considered as genetically `valuable’ could practise a quite liberal sexuality between 1933 and 1945. Moreover, the war had a profound impact on gender relations and sexual habits. With 20 million soldiers away from home for over five years, the lives of married women economically and sexually resembled those of single women. As Cornelie Usborne and Regina Mühlhäuser have shown throughout the war both sexes encountered opportunities for extramarital sex. Post-war chaos led to further opportunities, hereby creating manifold problems and tensions between couples. Many women of all classes “fraternized” with allied forces while their husbands or fiancés experienced denazification, unemployment or captivity in internment camps. For a short historical moment, the former hegemonic status of Aryan German manhood became precarious and marginal. At the same time, women had become accustomed to a life without a husband taking responsibility for their families. They had experienced significant hardship during bombing raids and this continued after the war with a shortage of food, housing and income. Returning husbands sometimes complicated an already difficult situation. How did couples who had been alienated for years handle the manifold problems such as sexual dysfunction, domestic violence, sexual and emotional alienation?
This paper explores specific kinds of sexual realities with which German men and women were confronted. By consulting divorce files as well as readers’ letters to the journal Liebe und Ehe (Love and Marriage, 1949-1951), the paper analyses what kind of sexual and gendered configurations this crisis produced, the ways in which these realities were publically and privately handled, and what impact they had on later discourses of masculinity and femininity.
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Cornelie Usborne : Sleeping with the Enemy. German Women and Prisoners of War in the Second World War
Drawing on a substantial body of new archival material, e.g. transcripts of police interrogations and especially letters and mementos secretly exchanged between German women and their foreign lovers, I shall examine how women practised sex and talked about it during the Second World War. Many thousands of young women were ... (Show more)
Drawing on a substantial body of new archival material, e.g. transcripts of police interrogations and especially letters and mementos secretly exchanged between German women and their foreign lovers, I shall examine how women practised sex and talked about it during the Second World War. Many thousands of young women were denounced, interrogated and convicted for conducting illicit affairs with POWs and punished with penal servitude. Thus at the level of the state they were expelled from the national community and became outsiders just like their foreign boyfriends. They were accused of destroying German honour, undermining the war effort and endangering racial purity especially if their lovers stemmed from Eastern European countries. Contrary to Nazi propaganda, my sources reveal a counter picture of both POWs and their German mistresses: female defendants’ own narratives speak of admiration for these prisoners on account of their often impressive work ethic, their affectionate nature and their powerful sex appeal. As a sign of tacit tolerance or even approval women’s immediate community often shielded both women and their lovers from the attention of constables and Gestapo officers. Finally, these judicial files can shed rare light how women under the special conditions of war expressed their desire and what role they played in sexual encounters. Did wartime fundamentally change women’s behaviour? Was there a special allure of foreign men and Frenchmen in particular? What light do these relationships throw on gender relations, women’s war-time experience and their view of marriage and motherhood? (Show less)



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