GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (review)

As so often happens in historical pursuits, Maria Höhn approached her resources with a different set of questions from those that proceeded to inform her book. Initially, she intended to study how Germans transitioned from Nazism to democratic capitalism in the postwar decades. A single letter helped change her direction to the present study, which is an exploration of the encounters between German civilians and U.S. soldiers during the U.S. military buildup in West Germany. GIs and Fräuleins examines the ways in which racial and gender hierarchies informed relations between Germans and Americans in Rhineland-Palatinate garrison towns, against the larger backdrop of the Nazi past and the drive to secure West Germany's position in the Western alliance, and away from its communistic neighbor.

Höhn takes her cues from the cultural history of recent decades. In viewing the U.S. military presence as an "encounter," rather than a one-way process of Americanization, she argues that Germans accepted parts of American culture, but rejected others. Specifically, she explores conservative efforts on the part of the Christian Democrats, clergy, and welfare organizations to thwart what they saw as the moral decline of German society in the face of the overwhelming American military presence. By and large, these efforts failed, and Germans melded relatively well with their American neighbors in the Rhineland region. Höhn specifically notes the aspects of consumer society that Germans embraced: cars, jazz and rock music, and fashion. In addition, the hosts began to relax the formality inherent in traditional German culture.

Germans' adaptation of U.S. racial segregation practices enabled them to accept these features of American consumer culture. Initially, the conservative element warned that out-of-control female sexuality (which they linked with consumerism and materialism) spelled moral chaos for the Rhineland-Palatinate. But by the mid-1950s, Germans and Americans had collaborated to create "clean" bars where white U.S. soldiers and German women could commingle with little interference, while standards for black-only pubs were lowered. Authorities branded all women frequenting these locales as prostitutes. However, interracial couples were less likely to be married, because the U.S. military applied harsher rules to black GIs wishing to marry German women; for example, some commanders insisted that the soldier have the financial resources needed to send his wife back to Germany should the couple divorce. Responses to interracial couples thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy: mixed-race couples were shunned in part because they were not respectably married, yet they could not wed because the U.S. military and many Germans did not approve of interracial marriages. Germans shifted their racial prejudices, according to Höhn, from Jews to blacks during the 1950s.

Germans, especially the younger generation, clung to the individualism and freedom represented by American-style democracy. They rejected the heavy-handed surveillance used by the German police and courts to determine whether female companions were prostitutes or wives of GIs. For their part, African American soldiers initially viewed a tour of duty in Germany as a top choice. By the late 1960s that view no longer held, as Germans reflected the racial prejudices of their mentors. This important book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the U.S. military's interactions with foreign civilians, the military's presence in Europe during the cold war, and in gender and race relations in 1950s West Germany.