This chapter uses a selection of wartime love letters between soldiers and their wives/girlfriends to make two arguments. It shows how the world that couples constructed for themselves through the conventions of exchanging love letters was subject to many outside influences. It considers among others the case of a young woman who corresponded with multiple soldier penfriends, doubtless motivated by her own quest for pleasure and attention but also encouraged by regime messages to young women on the home front urging them to send ‘love tokens’ to unattached men at the front. Overall, however, the chapter makes the case that intimate correspondence between home and front, particularly where it evoked sexual feelings, could for all its conventional qualities constitute a refuge for individuals from the anxieties caused by the war and the dangers faced by front-line soldiers and civilians on the home front.

This chapter examines the home leave granted to soldiers during the Second World War as a fundamental dimension of private life for millions of Germans in wartime. It explores the topic from a number of different perspectives. It outlines the regime’s policies and propaganda regarding home leave as a privilege, focusing on the regime’s goals and its conflicting impulses both to control the time men spent away from their military duties and to allow some degree of undisturbed privacy. The chapter then examines personal letters between home and front in order to explore the expectations and experiences relating to home leave on the part of the men on leave and their wives or girlfriends and families. Finally, it uses cases from military and civil courts to show instances of marital conflict and domestic violence associated with home leave.

This chapter takes the case study of one couple in wartime to examine the intersections between private life and ideas about the Volksgemeinschaft. It argues that the couple’s performance of the rituals of intimacy, the cultivation by each of them of a particular individual persona, and their exchange of letters, photographs and goods were all embedded within the war’s larger material, emotional and political economies. In the process, the couple sought to aestheticise their experiences and to capture through photographs happy memories of moments during wartime for the post-war future they envisaged.

This chapter examines the home leave granted to soldiers during the Second World War as a fundamental dimension of private life for millions of Germans in wartime. It explores the topic from a number of different perspectives. It outlines the regime’s policies and propaganda regarding home leave as a privilege, focusing on the regime’s goals and its conflicting impulses both to control the time men spent away from their military duties and to allow some degree of undisturbed privacy. The chapter then examines personal letters between home and front in order to explore the expectations and experiences relating to home leave on the part of the men on leave and their wives or girlfriends and families. Finally, it uses cases from military and civil courts to show instances of marital conflict and domestic violence associated with home leave.