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| 21 2 Trostlose Stunden German War Widows Dressed in deep mourning attire and dabbing at her tears, Frau Hillemann, a railway manager’s widow, sat in her pastor’s study after her husband’s funeral. In answering Reverend Farbig’s question of whether she intended to move away from the small village where she lived with her twenty-year-old daughter, Luise, to the provincial capital, the widow replied, “Yes, it would be the best that we could do, since we have to be out of our apartment, and I can’t find another. You see, Pastor,” Frau Hillemann sighed, “it would be good if we could earn a little money, at least my daughter, and she would more likely find finishing work to do in the city than in the village.” As Anica Helmar’s 1906 short story “Einsame Frauen” (Solitary Women) develops, Frau Hillemann’s daughter does indeed find Handwerk, or finishing work, in the textile industry, but the two fare poorly, and soon the widow goes begging to the welfare office only to return empty-handed.1 A brief glance at the history of widowhood in post-unification Germany indicates that even before August 1914, widows spent many comfortless hours weighing their futures in a rapidly changing society and economy.2 Germany had begun its transformation from agrarian to industrializing nation by the time of the Austrian Archduke’s assassination. Workers like Luise Hillemann were relative newcomers to industrial labor. Peasants moved from rural Germany to industrial cities, still maintaining close cultural and physical ties to the countryside as they labored in large factories. Industrial growth separated two institutions fundamental to traditional German society: the family and the workplace. Women made up about 30 percent of the German workforce in the early years of the twentieth century.3 Although by August 1914 German society was transitioning from a feudal past to a modern nation, its culture remained in many ways a pre-modern one. Military values, including the assumption of male superiority and a reliance on authority and hierarchy, held fast despite great economic change. 22 | Trostlose Stunden: German War Widows Before the war, laborers were excluded from political decision making and denied social respect, in addition to being exploited at work. While all workers were marginalized, female laborers were doubly so, given overall male domination. One Reichstag member, for example, declared that independent thought and action should not be encouraged in women.4 Marriage confirmed women’s subordinate position because the concept of Züchtigungsrecht (the right to use corporal punishment) made a husband’s beating of his wife a legal right. Upon widowhood, women’s status reverted to that of unmarried women, and they had few rights. Legal scholar Paul Schüler opined that widows’ social and economic position in nineteenth-century German society was so inferior that it would have been better for her if she had died when her husband did.5 Because the liberal tradition of natural rights resonated only half-heartedly in Germany, early feminists relied on a “Germanic” balance between women’s duties in the home and their rights to economic and social equality. The middle-class German women’s movement downplayed female suffrage, focusing instead on women’s contributions to society as mothers.6 Motherhood retained its hallowed place during the Weimar Republic, making it more difficult for feminists, and feminist widows, to challenge the traditional place of women in German society after the Great War.7 The Imperial government had encouraged industrialization while still barring the passage to social and political equality. When war broke out in 1914, the juxtaposition of a ritualistic German military still mired in the nineteenth century with the twentieth-century industrial forces that would actually fight the war stood in stark relief in the commercial and newly industrial city of Hamburg. On July 31, half of a platoon of soldiers and a drummer suddenly appeared in the City Hall marketplace. The soldiers marched and the drummer drummed while an officer read aloud the war declaration. But no one seemed aware that this old Prussian ceremony meant that Germany was now at war, and the crowd dispersed as quickly as it had gathered.8 The excitement with which young German men and women greeted the World War is now largely recognized as myth. In a response typical of most of the contributors to Helene Hurwitz-Stranz’s anthology of war widows’ recollections , when one soldier’s wife learned in August 1914 that her husband...

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