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| 123 5 “The Other Trench” Remarriage, Pro-natalism, and the Rebirthing of the Nation The medieval town of Magdeburg, situated on the Elbe River in north central Germany, has a history that is wedded at important junctures to the institution of marriage. It was consecrated in a.d. 805 by the Roman Emperor Charlemagne, and in 929 the German King Henry I bequeathed the city to Edward the Elder’s daughter Edith as a Morgengabe—a gift to the bride by the groom’s family on the morning after the wedding feast. The word “Magdeburg” meant “pure maid” in Old High German, and presumably the English-born bride had lived up to that expectation.1 Edith, who had married Henry I’s son Otto I, loved the town of Magdeburg and spent much of her life there. Upon her death her descendants buried her in the crypt of Magdeburg’s Benedictine Abbey of Saint Maurice. In 1524 Martin Luther brought the Protestant Reformation to Magdeburg, where he had begun his education years earlier. The city’s printers adopted his ideas with gusto, hastening its influence by distributing several religious tracts.2 In 1525, the theologian, priest, and author of The Estate of Marriage renounced his vow of chastity and at the age of forty-two married Katharina von Bora, a twenty-six-year-old former nun who, under the spell of the Reformation, had fled her Cistercian convent at Nimbschen, Germany. A Magdeburg colleague of Luther’s, Nikolaus von Amsdorf, made the Luther–von Bora match. The plucky Katharina proved her housekeeping skills as a consummate gardener and cattle breeder. The duo established the former Augustinian monastery in Erfurt as their residence, and six children soon followed. The union between the former monk and the one-time nun was not only a productive one but also a happy one. When Katharina became a widow in 1546, she discovered that her husband had taken the unusual step of naming her as his sole heir.3 By the time of the First World War, Magdeburg faced challenges endemic to countless municipalities across Germany and in all the warring European 124 | Remarriage, Pro-natalism, and the Rebirthing of the Nation nations. The war consumed millions of lives and drained local and national resources. In the aftermath, scores of army units began making their way back to their homelands as per the November 1918 armistice agreements. Many returning soldiers were physically, mentally, and emotionally damaged from the bloodiest conflict the world had ever witnessed, a fight they had believed would last only a few months. Veterans sought restitution in the form of health care, compensation, and, for those physically able, at least the promise of employment from the governments that had sent them into battle. At the same time, war survivors began their hopeful, if embittered, trek toward a decent standard of living for themselves and for their children. Many of these were war widows. They, too, sought justice in the form of compensation for lost breadwinners and for the paying positions that industry , urged on by governments, had taken from them.4 In Magdeburg, officials turned to marriage as a solution to its war-induced woes by encouraging nuptials between members of the two groups of survivors sitting on the lowest rung of economic well-being. Another local matchmaker , menswear store owner Benno Basch, facilitated the dating service by entreating the local welfare office to arrange meetings between ex-soldiers and war widows. Matchmaking must have seemed, serendipitously, a solution to more than one problem. The injured required physical care from an attendant ; the widow needed additional income, particularly if she had children to feed from her first marriage; and the nation needed survivors to remarry so that they could produce more youths and help their society rebuild and regenerate after a devastating, life-consuming war. In one instance, a Magdeburg housewife had been married to a bakery owner prior to the guns of August; she reportedly could not operate her husband’s business by herself after his death. The shop brought in only 2.5 to 2.75 marks per day, she complained , a scant income that proved to be enough to pay rent on the store and the widow’s apartment, but nothing else. While the aggrieved had been advised to take bookkeeping lessons, she refused to be separated from her children to do so. She soon found a new husband—one who understood the bakery business—through the marriage broker...

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