Coming to Terms with the Nation: The Political and Literary Voices of Women

Abstract

Though restricted by gendered divisions of labour, three generations of German mothers, daughters and working women have made a significant contribution to political and cultural change over the last fifty years. While thousands of men did time as prisoners of war from 1945 to 1955, millions of women served the nation by digging their towns and cities out of the ruins and, later, giving birth to the postwar baby boomers. Their engagement in new social movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s helped to consolidate the fledgling democracy from the bottom up, as did their eventual entry into mainstream politics during the 1980s. Women’s participation in the process of national identity formation was nonetheless rooted in mutually exclusive historical-legal frameworks prior to 1990. Beyond underscoring the major differences between East and West German women’s formal rights, unity has highlighted a conundrum of female identities caught between the personal and the political. Rather than provide an historical survey of women’s movements, this chapter addresses deeper philosophical questions about women’s place in the unified state. The sample of ‘voices’ offered here by no means represents all segments of society, but it does encompass an array of forces promoting or hindering women’s identification with the nation united. My review of select works authored by women since 1990 reflects three main themes: their attempts to confront a not-so-shared fascist past; their strategies for adjusting to ‘the nation’ as it presently stands; and the effort made by women on both sides to come to terms with each other.