GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany [Hardcover]

Maria H÷hn (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0807827061 | ISBN-13: 978-0807827062 | Publication Date: June 19, 2002

With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and Fr¤uleins, Maria H¶hn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s.

Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, H¶hn shows that Germany's Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Hohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, they also brought Jim Crow.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Recasts the terms of debate over the legacies of Nazism and the persistence of antisemitism, deepens our understanding of processes of Americanization and secularization, and makes sense of 1950s West Germans' distinctive contradictory mix of punitive and tolerant attitudes toward nonmarital heterosexuality. (Dagmar Herzog, Michigan State University)

About the Author

Maria Höhn is assistant professor of history at Vassar College.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (June 19, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807827061
• ISBN-13: 978-0807827062
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,239,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Amis and Veronikas, September 8, 2002

By 

Ron Hunka (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Hardcover)

"GIs and Fraeuleins"
Maria Hoehn
ISBN 0-8078-5375-5

This book explores the culture clash that occurred during the Cold War in the 1950's when American GIs were first stationed in large numbers in the towns of Baumholder and Kaiserslautern in the rural Rhineland-Palatinate state of Germany, between the Rhine and Mosel rivers. Having served in Germany a decade later, I was surprised at the extent to which there had been such problems. In Mannheim, most of the issues that Maria Hoehn describes were not readily apparent. But Mannheim was urban versus the relatively provincial character of Baumholder and Kaiserlautern of the previous decade.

Some of Hoehn's themes in this book include the impact the American soldier's money and lifestyle on rural German society, the German conservatives' attempt to punish German women who associated with GIs, especially black GIs, and the irony of the Germans' rejection of discrimination against Jews in the new Federal democracy vis-à-vis their acceptance of it against black American soldiers. Certainly, Hoehn points out, white attitudes toward fellow black soldiers played a role in the German view.

Hoehn's documentation from publications of the time convincingly demonstrates that there were significant racial problems and that many Germans vehemently opposed intimate associations between German women and American blacks, so much so that the conservative CDU political party and various religious organizations tried to have these women legally classified as prostitutes.

Hoehn writes that many Germans including those who had lost ancestral lands to American military installations began to cash in on the boom by renting rooms to Americans. Barns and attics were transformed into apartments. German families moved into their own kitchens to be able rent out the rest of the house to the Americans who were willing to pay four or five times the going rate. Hoehn quips that in the small towns where everyone usually kept animals that some Germans had to choose between having a pig or an American, an "Ami" in the German parlance of the time.

Due to high unemployment throughout Germany at this time, many young women came to the area hoping for a job as a maid for an American family, a waitress, or a dancer at an establishment that catered to American soldiers. Many, who had lost homes and parents during the war, hoped to escape from a life of poverty. Some were refugees from the former territories or East Germany. These women did not find favor in the traditional view of the residents of the area for their fraternization with American soldiers, especially black American soldiers. Such women were dubbed "Veronikas". A number of them were arrested and subjected to humiliating trials in local courts by extremist judges. Efforts for national legislation classifying these women as prostitutes by the coalition of CDU, Protestant, and Catholic leaders ultimately failed.

This book is an excellent, well-documented piece of research. Although Hoehn's writing is somewhat academic and redundant in places, this is a commendable book of considerable merit. Those interested in postwar German history and even some former GIs may get new insight from it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read for the German-American Cold War Experiences, October 14, 2002

By 

Jim Brown (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Paperback)

"GIs and Frauleins" presents a comprehensive review of the cultural and economic impact the massive American military machine imposed on a small, agrarian, and relatively poor German state at the peak of the Cold War. This book presents a seminal work for the comprehension of later cultural clashes that dominated both the United States and Germany and continue to the present.

I recommend it for both the serious scholar as well as the casual reader of social and demographic history.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Modernization = Americanization?, October 9, 2002

By 

Brian Huck (Mainz (Germany)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Hardcover)

Unlike the previous reviewer, who took issue with the allegedly "academic" style of the book, I found it was very readable, avoiding a lot of the "constructing the other" and "conflicting gender identities" type of language one might expect to find in an academic book of this sort. This does not mean, however, that the book does not address the kind of conceptual, academic issues that are frequently raised in such stilted terms. In no sense is the book merely an antiquarian show-and-tell kind of catalog; it quite thoroughly discusses the "holy Trinity" of race, class, and gender issues. I found the discussion of German and American forms of racism to be especially interesting.

The content of the book has, for the most part, been adequately addressed in the "official" Amazon review as well as in the previous customer review. There is one aspect, however, that deserves further mention, and which I found particularly insightful: Höhn's discussion of whether the changes that came to the rural areas she discusses would be best described as modernization or as Americanization. This sort of issue is something which would interest anyone who is concerned with the cultural issues of globalization and the dominance of American cultural products in today's markets. Because she focuses on an area in which there was a very strong American presence in the immediate post-war years, it is not surprising that her evidence shows a significant American component to the modernization process. It would be interesting to compare her conclusions in this regard to those of someone studying an area where American influence was less direct and personal. This comparison would better demonstrate whether the American influence was a necessary, or merely a contemporary, component of German societal modernization. Such a comparison, however, would not fit very well into a book titled "GIs and Fräuleins." Höhn is to be commended for putting the abundant evidence which she presents into such a larger context of modernization debates, and not faulted for not being more encyclopedic.