7 - “A Different Family Story”: German Wartime Suffering in Women's Writing by Wibke Bruhns, Ute Scheub, and Christina von Braun

Summary

WAR IS ALMOST ALWAYS AND EVERY WHERE the business of men,” quotes Ute Scheub of Barbara Ehrenreich. It is a statement that recalls Ruth Klüger's well-known words in weiter Leben: Eine Jugend (Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, 1992): “wars, and hence the memories of wars, are owned by the male of species.” Clearly these generalizations simplify the complexities of historical reality and omit women's roles as supporters, participants, and onlookers in wars and what leads up to them. Yet they lay bare the fact that men begin, wage, and justify wars, while women generally suffer from them. Even though German civilian women were among those first, and even foremost, affected by bombardment, displacement, occupation, and expulsion, a gendered perspective is often missing from the public discourse on “Germans as victims” of the Second World War. For instance, both Jörg Friedrich's seminal Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–45 (The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940–1945, 2002) and his later photo documentation Brandstätten (Fire Sites, 2003) display distraught women on their cover, yet neither text discusses women as a separate and distinct group of victims of war. Even though Günter Grass's protagonist Tulla Prokriefke in Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002) is a woman, she does not perceive the war and flight in ways much different from men. Her female experience, for the most part, consists of giving birth to the narrator.