A Foreign Affair directed by Billy Wilder, and: Hallo Fräulein! directed by Rudolf Jugert, and: The Big Lift directed by George Seaton (review)

The 'Fräulein' movies feature the complicated relationship between American GIs and young German women in the aftermath of the Second World War. To paraphrase Annette Brauerhoch, the author of GIs and Fräuleins, prior to the Second World War, 'Fräulein' signified an independent, young, and single woman. However, in the years after the war the term acquired a very different connotation, implying a consuming femme fatale who seeks out American soldiers in occupied Germany. At the same time, homecoming German veterans felt threatened in their masculinity by American GIs, who appeared affluent, strong, and healthy. For the most part, German men saw fraternizing women as treacherous because of their alleged promiscuity with the occupying forces. Suffice it to say, fraternization—real or imagined—triggered heated debates in Germany's postwar media as well as police and social welfare reports. Hence it does not come as a surprise that until 1961 four American and three German feature films depicted this controversial topic. Thereafter, the 'Fräulein' figure disappeared from the silver screen until Rainer Werner Fassbinder's acclaimed motion picture The Marriage of Maria Braun in 1978.

For the most part, filmmakers kept the licentious women out of the focus, and preferred to portray them as marginal characters, even though more than 250.000 American soldiers were consistently stationed in Germany until the reunification in 1990, and approximately one out of four young German woman entertained a relationship with a member of the American Armed Forces during the initial years of occupation. More importantly, none of the films features interracial relationships between African-American soldiers and white German women, although 3.000 out of the 68.000 'occupation children,' born to German mothers and fathered by American GIs during 1945 to 1949, were so-called 'Mischlinge' ('mixed bloods'). In what follows, I want to show that the American and German 'Fräulein' films, although substantially different in educational impetus and ideological strategies, coincide in the erasure of African American GIs.

The first American 'Fräulein' movie, Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948) allegorically depicts the political relation between the US and Germany as a romance between an American GI and a German woman. The narrative begins in 1947, when a United States congressional committee led by prudish Phoebe Frost of Iowa (Jean Arthur) arrives Berlin to visit the American troops stationed there. Phoebe hears rumors that cabaret singer Erika von Schlütow (Marlene Dietrich), suspected of having been the former mistress of a high Nazi official, is protected by an unidentified American officer. She enlists Captain John Pringle to assist her in the investigation unaware he is Erika's current lover. For Phoebe fraternization is like "moral malaria," or an illustration what will happen if America gets too much involved in foreign affairs. At a time when American foreign policies sought to avoid further costly involvements into the European postwar economic crisis, Wilder's film redefines the political problem as an ethical one. On a narrative level, the film asks whether Captain Pringle can safely return to womanhood in America? And, if Congresswoman Frost's innocence and traditional values win over Erika von Schlütow's European sophistication and moral cynicism? In return, Erika's sexual opportunism and moral cynicism reflect American suspicions about Germany's political loyalty. Casting Marlene Dietrich, the Weimar Republic femme fatale, in the role of the seductress who emasculates an American officer overseas, Billy Wilder congenially blurs the strict boundaries between good American and evil Germans. Undoubtedly, Wilder's wit and wry irony helped to render one of Hollywood's classic romantic comedies. Even if The Nation critic James Agee derided the film's "rotten taste" (July 24th 1948: 109) to show American troops overseas in...