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Memories of wartime sexual violence: Elderly German women

looking back on their lives

Abstract:

Memories of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers against German women during and shortly after the Second World War (WWII) were contested within dominant memory discourses in postwar East and West-Germany. In current public debates a strong taboo on memories of German women who had been raped is assumed. Drawing on 5 months of fieldwork I analyze the practices of four elderly German women concerning communicating and concealing their experiences of wartime rape throughout their lives. I embed the data collected through life history interviews in academic findings on wartime sexual violence and on contesting German memory discourses on WWII. Why, when and how German women decided to make their experiences of wartime sexual violence explicit depended on their societal position, their personal social relationships and the availability of memory discourses that suited their accounts. I discuss how the women mobilized specific

discourses with the aim to deal with and to seek recognition for their experiences.

Keywords: wartime sexual violence; rape; Second World War; memory discourses; Germany

Master Thesis Dorothea M. Dechau Student number: 0581224 Mail: dodo_m_dechau@hotmail.com Supervisor & first reader: Erica van der Sijpt Second reader: Kristine Krause Research Master Social Sciences University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, 21-05-2014

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Memories of wartime sexual violence: Elderly German women looking back

on their lives

Introduction

In 2010 a heated debate was held in the federal parliament of Berlin about a proposition put forward by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).1 The proposition called for “A monument for the

women who had been dishonored since spring 1945 in Berlin”. The proposer was criticized harshly for his choice of words as well as for the demarcation of the time period by which the group of remembered women was defined. The CDU was accused of exploiting the individual fates of women who had suffered sexual violence to suit a selective nationalist interpretation of history. The sexual violence committed against women in Berlin was presented outside the context of sexual violence committed against women from various countries by soldiers from all armies during World War II (WWII), which made the proposition suspicious. Members of the parliament suspected that the objective of the proposition was vote catching among the conservative electorate and not a serious discussion of the phenomenon of wartime sexual violence or finding a constructive approach to help the women who had been raped. Another objection made by the parliament was the choice of the word ‘dishonored’ instead of raped, which maintained the ascription of shame to the women who had been raped. The proposition was rejected by all other parties, but one insight was shared by all parties during this debate: the existence of a societal taboo on the personal accounts of women who had been raped during WWII. While the CDU thought a monument a proper way to counter the fact that hundreds of thousands of German women could never have talked about the violence they had experienced, representatives of other political parties had very different ideas about this question. Alice Ströver from the Green party argued that support and care for the women who had been raped was far more important than erecting a monument for them. She stressed the importance of the possibility to talk about sexual violence and that many of the women still needed to come to terms with their experiences (Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin 2010: 6375). Brigitte Lange from the Social Democratic Party emphasized in her reaction the necessity to analyze the dimensions of the societal taboo on the individual fates of the women and the need to empower these women instead of reassigning them the role of victim (Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin 2010: 6374). This debate illustrates

1 The minutes of the debate include speeches and reactions from members of all parliament parties. The full

minutes of the parliament meeting can be found on the website of the Berlin parliament (Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin).

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the ongoing struggle of diverse memory discourses in postwar Germany about sexual violence committed against German women during and shortly after WWII.

During and shortly after the Second World War, sexual violence was committed against women of all countries, at probably all fronts and by soldiers from all armies. The frequency and the manner of the committed sexual violence differed highly between the location, the perpetrators and the victims; sometimes and in some places it took a massive form (Eifler 1999; Mühlhäuser 2001; Sander and Johr 1992; Schmidt-Harzbach 1984). Approximately two hundred thousand women from mainly Korea, China and the Philippines were abducted and enslaved in so called “comfort stations” – military brothels, where they were raped and tortured by Japanese soldiers for many years during WWII (Zipfel 2001: 1). Many of the women were killed.Soldiers from the German Wehrmacht and the SS committed sexual torture and rape against women and girls during the invasion into the Soviet Union from the year 1941 onwards (Burds 2009; Mühlhäuser 2008: 1). In the concentration camps and military brothels of the Nazi regime persecuted women had to experience sexual torture, sexual slavery and rape structurally (Schmidt-Harzbach 1984: 55; Burds 2009: 43). While research about sexual violence committed by the Wehrmacht and the SS is still rather rare2, the topic of the

so-called “comfort women” is receiving more attention.3 The allied soldiers of the French, the

British, the American and the Russian Army also raped women and girls during their military campaigns and occupations in WWII (Lilly 2007). German women had to experience sexual violence especially in the last year of WWII, when the allied troops entered occupied territories and the German state territory. The estimates vary between hundreds of thousands up to 2 million instances of rape of German women by allied soldiers in the years between 1944 and 1947. Numerically Russian soldiers formed the majority of the perpetrators (Naimark 1995; Mühlhäuser 2001: 384; Sander and Johr 1992).

It is the sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers that the proposition of the CDU was suggestively referring to and it is on this violence that I want to focus in this article. Memories about this violence and the remembrance of the women who had been raped are still contested in

Germany.4 In German public debate about the sexual violence politicians, academics and writers

emphasize the taboo on the personal accounts of the women. It seems to be common sense that it

2 The sexual violence committed in the occupied countries in the East has been especially ignored for a long

time in research (Burds 2009: 37). For further research on sexual violence committed by Wehrmacht and SS, see Beck (2004), Meinen (2002) and Mühlhäuser (2010).

3 The digital catalogue of the International Research Group “Sexual violence in Armed Conflict” counts 75

publications for the search term “comfort women”, see: http://svac.his-online.de/.

4 Memories about the sexual violence committed by allied soldiers from the American, British and French

forces are contested as well, but in this article I will focus on sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers and the memories of this violence.

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has been difficult and often impossible for the women to make their experiences of sexual violence explicit, throughout their lives. Yet by re-emphasizing the taboo on giving account and by failing to look for the accounts that might actually be available, the nature of the restrictions and possibilities for explicit accounts will continue to be misunderstood. In this article, I will look at personal accounts of women who did express their experiences of sexual violence and analyze these accounts in the context of struggles about memory discourses in postwar Germany. I will elaborate why, when and how four German women, who had been raped by Russian soldiers at the end of WWII, made their experiences explicit, in different stages of their life courses.

Personal ‘projects’ within the power struggle around memory

Memory discourses which develop after times of violence, when the social order has been disrupted, are used to re-interpret the past, to align memories and to found new identities (Mader 2012: 18). The anthropologist Regine Mader argues that memory should not be understood as a storage function of past events but as aimed at the present and the future and at the political positions of the subjects that do remember (Mader 2012: 16). In postwar societies dominant discourses, established by groups with more political power exist next to and can be contested by counter-discourses, developed and used by less powerful groups. Struggles over the authority to make violent experiences explicit are determined by power relations within society. These struggles can take place on different levels: in the public spheres of society and in the private realm of social relationships within groups or families. Women’s experiences and memories are generally underrepresented in the dominant memory discourses about wars (Seifert, 1999: 48).

Whether individuals, who carry memories of violence with them, can make these

experiences explicit or not depends on the accessibility of suitable discourses, their position within society and their wish and capacity to mobilize these discourses. Individuals should not be seen as autonomous entities but as subjects who are always part of a social group in which they maintain subjectively important relationships. In feminist theory the idea has been developed 'that persons are socially embedded and that agent's identities are formed within the context of social

relationships and shaped by a complex of intersecting social determinants, such as race, class, gender and ethnicity' (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000: 4). This does not mean that individual persons are completely defined by their position in the social fabric, but that they are social subjects with the capacity of agency; they are social agents. Ortner describes social agents as ‘always involved in’ a

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‘multiplicity of social relations in which they are enmeshed’ (Ortner 2006: 130). Making experiences of sexual violence explicit (or not) can be understood as an agentive act of a social subject.

Ortner states that agency ‘in probably the most common usage (…) is virtually synonymous with the forms of power people have at their disposal, their ability to act on their own behalf, influence other people and events, and maintain some kind of control in their own lives’ (Ortner 2006: 143-144). With the help of agency in the sense of intentionally pursuing culturally defined projects ‘people seek to accomplish valued things within a framework of their own terms, their own categories of values’ (Ortner 2006: 145). But agents are acting within social relationships that are characterized by asymmetries of power and social inequality. Ortner thus specifies her concept of agency as defined by three characteristics: first, intentionality; second, universality and at the same time cultural “constructedness”; and third, the specific relationship between agency and power (Ortner 2006: 134).

What Ortner understands as intentionality includes a wide range of possible plans, as she argues:' ...intentionality in agency might include highly conscious plots and plans and schemes; somewhat more nebulous aims, goals; and ideals; and finally desires, “wants” and needs that may range from deeply buried to quite consciously felt.' (Ortner 2006: 134). Ortner's concept of agency thus includes both conscious plans and unconscious needs and desires. Agents intentionally pursue their personal, but culturally defined ‘projects’, which can be sought for openly or covertly. Seeking support from family members could be one personal project of the German women who had been raped; maintaining their social relationships within the family could be another project. Both projects imply a different way of handling and re-interpretation of those memories. The second characteristic of agency that Ortner describes is universality along with the cultural constructedness of it. She uses Sewell's argument that ‘a capacity for agency...is inherent in all humans’ (Sewell in Ortner 2006: 136), while at the same time agency is formed through different cultural ideas and schemata. By arguing that 'agency is differentially shaped, and also nourished or stunted, under different regimes of power...' (Ortner 2006: 137), she describes the third characteristic of agency as being always influenced by broader relations of power. With Ortner’s concept of agency I can understand the accounts of the German women as personal ‘projects’ that are pursued within the web of social relationships, which is characterized by power structures. Since I want to understand the motivations, capacities and ways of German women to make their experiences of sexual violence explicit or to conceal them as well as the assumed taboo on the women’s account Ortner’s

interpretation of agency is very useful for my analysis. The social relationships of the women, the

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cultural constrcutedness of those relationships and the power structures in postwar Germany can be included in the analysis of the personal accounts of the German women.

Within anthropology different ideas have been developed about the possibilities, restrictions and capacities to communicate experiences of violence. In a review of some of these perspectives Mader (2012) develops an argument that I find very useful for my analysis. Mader begins by

deconstructing the concept of experience within the work of Joan W. Scott who sees experience as a language event that constitutes subjects and identities. Scott understands experience as an event that is embedded by language in a discourse (Mader 2012: 4). She argues that experience and discourse are conditioned by each other and that identities are formed through the discursive processing of experiences (Mader 2012: 3). When the events that people live through are

characterized by violence their discursive processing becomes problematic. Suitable language and discourses in which to embed the violent event have to be available and accessible. However, it is exactly those discourses that are highly contested. Violent events are characterized by pain and to process these events into an communicable experience means that a language for pain has to be found. Some theorist understand pain as something unspeakable, like Scarry (1985), who argues that pain, as a result of violence, is impossible to communicate. Scarry claims that physical pain cannot be shared for it destroys language (Scarry 1985 in Mader 2012: 6). Mader refuses to follow this

argumentation since it would mean an end of the anthropology of pain and suffering (Mader 2012: 7).

Veena Das (1996), who researched sexual violence committed during violent conflicts between India and Pakistan in 1949, has developed a more constructive theory to understand the communication of pain and violent experiences. Das explains the silence of women who have experienced sexual violence as the absence of a suitable language for making these experiences explicit, instead of seeing it as evidence for the failure of language. In Das’s study the prevalent notion that women who had been raped are “dishonored” and “stained” made memories of sexual violence dangerous for these women (Das 1996: 84). Wives and daughters that had been abducted and raped were exposed to the danger of being rejected or even killed by their male family members in order to restore the family honor (Das 1996: 77).5 To be accepted and reintegrated into their

families can be seen, in Ortner’s terms, as the culturally defined projects of these women. To achieve these projects, the women had to stay silent about their experiences of sexual violence. These women lacked the position and the discourse to make their violent experiences explicit in a way that

5 Das states that such rejections happened probably less often than claimed in narratives, but that the popular

myth about sacrificing the daughter for maintaining the unsullied purity and honor of the family was a powerful one.

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did not jeopardize their social relations. The women were social agents as described by Mackenzie and Stoljar (2000), embedded in social relations with their family and community and shaped by intersecting social determinants (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000: 4). The women’s ethnicity and sex were the most important determinants at play for the lack of a suitable language to express experiences of sexual violence.

Making pain explicit in an utterance is understood by Das as a request for acknowledgement and recognition (Das 1996: 70). For Das it is not important what is or is not being expressed but the act of expression itself, which creates the association between the subject communicating the pain and the audience (Mader 2012: 8). Das describes how the traditional role of women to communicate the pain of loss by making it public through lamentation could not be employed. The fact that the sexual violence was interpreted as damaging the women’s and their families’ honor and by that jeopardizing the women’s social relationships was one reason for the women to stay silent. Also the fact that not only the men of the enemy had abducted and raped women, but also the men from their own group, made it impossible for these women to wail for the ones who had died during the Partition and for their pain caused by sexual violence (Das 1996: 82). These women had to find different ways to make their violent experiences and pain of loss explicit; they developed metaphors for their pain. But staying silent should not be seen as a lack of agency here.

In this article I understand the act of making sexual violence explicit as a communicative agentive act of women, who are social agents - subjects embedded in social relations and shaped by social determinants. With Ortner’s agency concept, and more specifically by focusing on the

intentionality and the pursuit of (culturally defined) projects, I hope to be able to unpack the women’s motivations and acts to communicate or to conceal their experiences of sexual violence. To understand the possibilities and restrictions the German women encountered in the pursuit of their projects I will look at the social relations the women were involved in and their social positions within society. By exploring the struggles around the memory discourses of the violent past of Germany I will sketch the field of the political power structure within which women were positioned and had to look for suitable discourses to communicate their experiences. With the help of Das’s ideas about utterances of pain as asking for acknowledgement and recognition I will look at the motivations of the German women to communicate their experiences.

In the following I will first discuss the research methods of my study. Second, I will shortly present the experiences of sexual violence as reported to me by the women I interviewed. Following this, I present the findings of my literature research about competing memory discourses in postwar

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Germany. Lastly, I will elaborate on why, when and how the interviewed women made their experiences of sexual violence explicit.

Research methods

The data for this article have been gathered through life-history interviews with elderly German women during a fieldwork period of 5 months in 2012 for my Master’s in Social Sciences. I tried to find as many women as possible that were willing to tell me about their experiences and their lives in general, and I managed to talk to four elderly German women. I reached my interviewees through purposive sampling and snowball sampling, since I was looking for German women with the specific experience of sexual violence committed by soldiers in and shortly after WWII. Finding gatekeepers that were willing to establish contact with elderly women turned out to be very difficult. There were no organizations offering counseling or support for this particular group of elderly women at that time6, and organizations working with women who had been harassed or raped indicated that they

have no contact with elderly women. The gatekeepers that helped me to establish contact were a pastor, an organization for contemporary witnesses and a family member of one of the

interviewees. The fourth woman I contacted myself, since I knew her name from newspaper articles and an appearance in a TV talk show, where she talked about the sexual violence Russian soldiers had committed against her. In my search for interviewees I disclosed my interest in the experiences of sexual violence from the beginning; I assumed that the openness of my approach would only attract women who were really willing to talk about their experiences of sexual violence.Throughout my study I respected the ethical principles developed for applied social science research about health questions (Hardon et.al. 2001). 7

The four women, whom I interviewed, were between 80 and 86 years old, at the time of my research. All four women had been raped by several Russian soldiers in the years between 1944 and 1947.8 Three of the four women were born and raised in former German East Prussia; one came

from East Pomerania, which was occupied by Nazi-Germany during WWII. The women experienced the sexual violence in their home villages and city, during their flight westwards from the Eastern

6 In 2013 the organization Paula e.V. was founded in Cologne. It focuses on counseling for women above 60

who struggle with experiences of (sexual) violence in the past or today; see http://www.paula-ev-koeln.de/.

7The three most important principles are: respect for persons, the principle of beneficence and the principle of

justice. During data collection the following principles should be respected by researchers: do not violate the respondents’ privacy, do not increase social stigma attached to certain groups, do not observe informants’ behavior without their consent, be aware of cultural values, traditions and taboos.

8 I looked for women who had been raped by allied soldiers, not only for women who had been raped by

Russian soldiers.

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Front and during internment after the war. Two of the four women have been civilian internees for several years after the war in labor camps in the Soviet Union, where they had to work.

The interviews were open-ended life history interviews and most of them lasted between one and a half hours to two and a half hours, with the exception of one interview that lasted for approximately five hours. The interviews took place in the houses of the women in an informal atmosphere and were recorded with a voice recorder, with consent of the interviewees.9 The

interviews were conducted in German, which is my and the interviewees’ mother tongue. I asked the women to tell me about their childhood and youth, their family, and to continue their accounts more or less chronologically towards their experiences during and after WWII. I was also interested in their lives after the war and mostly in when and how they were able to speak about their experiences of sexual violence. Possibilities to mobilize certain memory discourses depend on social relationships and social positions. These relations and positions are not static but can change throughout the lives of subjects. Keeping this in mind the life-history approach was the most suitable one for my research since it would give me insights in changes of social positions the women occupied and of the social relations in which they were involved. Three of the four women were used to talking about their lives including about their experiences of rape. These three had all managed to mobilize discourses to make their experiences explicit. They have been interviewed before about their lives and their life stories were published in a book or a newspaper. One woman spoke to me for the first time about the sexual violence she had endured. Even though some women already published about their experiences before, under their real name, I chose to use pseudonyms in this article in order to guarantee the anonymity of all interviewees.

To broaden my background knowledge about sexual violence I conducted a literature study about the topics of trauma, PTSD, sexual violence in war and conflict and sexual violence committed by allied soldiers at the end of WWII. The research included literature from the fields of social sciences, history, psychology and geriatrics. Additionally I conducted interviews with four German scholars and professionals working on the topic of sexual violence in an academic and clinical setting or working with traumatized elderly people.

The fact that I interviewed only four elderly German women prevents me from making any general claims. The study is an explorative study on the ways of dealing with the difficult experience of wartime sexual violence in the specific historical and societal setting of postwar Germany. The

9 Only one interview was not recorded. Since the woman communicated beforehand that she had great

difficulties to open up about her story, I decided against the use of a recorder to minimize obstacles for developing a comfortable situation.

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openness and readiness of the women I interviewed to talk about their experiences can be seen as rather unrepresentative for elderly German women who experienced rape in WWII, given the difficulties I (and other researchers) had to find interviewees.10 But the insights that I could gain

through the interviews with women who do speak about their experiences can tell us something about the circumstances and the conditions that made it possible for them to speak about their experiences, to break the silence that a lot of women did not break during their lives. With the help of the interview data and autobiographical written texts that originate from years ago, I could gain valuable insights into why, when and how women made their experiences explicit.

Experiences of sexual violence

In a very brief manner I will introduce the four women I interviewed and their experiences of sexual violence as they narrated them in the interviews and as described in the autobiographical texts they let me read.

Frau Ahorn who was 84 years old when I interviewed her, was born and raised on a farm in a small village in East Prussia. In January 1945 she and her mother tried to flee westwards, with the approaching Eastern Front behind them. When the refugee trek was overtaken by the front, she was abducted together with other women and girls by Russian soldiers. The women and girls were brought to a remote house where they were held captive and raped. Frau Ahorn was 16 years old at that time. After several days she managed to escape the house and walked back through the woods to the farm where she and her mother were temporarily housed. She tried to hide in the attic for some days but was found and taken again by Russian soldiers. This time she had to walk in a trek of detained Germans for several hundred kilometers to Insterburg where they all were incarcerated. From there she was brought to different labor camps in the Soviet Union, at the Caspian Sea and in the Caucasus. She was held captive as a civil internee in work camps and camps for prisoners of war for almost 4 years. In 1948 she was brought to Germany by train and finally released in November 1948 from the quarantine camp in Fürstenwalde. She settled in West Berlin, where she found an apprenticeship and employment as a nurse. She married and had one son.

Frau Pfeffer, 86 years old at the time of the interview was also born and raised in East Prussia. She fled with her family from her East Prussian village westwards in January 1945, but the

10 The Research group of Kuwert and Eichhorn had a different experience. Unexpectedly, they received

numerous reactions to their call for participation in a study on traumatization in elderly German women through sexual violence by allied soldiers. See Kuwert, P. Knaevelsrud, C., & Freyberger, H. (2010). It has to be mentioned that the researchers had many resources to publish their call nationwide via a press release.

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Eastern Front also outran her refugee trek. In the house where the family took shelter she was raped by Russian officers and soldiers; she was 18 years old. The family returned to their farm. In the month between their return and their later expulsion from East Prussia, she had to run and hide from the sexual violence perpetrated by Russian soldiers. In this time she was raped another two times. When she and her family were expelled from East Prussia in October 1945, they were

transported in a wagon train under miserable circumstances together with many other Germans. All expellees suffered from hunger, many became sick and some even died on the way or shortly after the journey. Frau Pfeffer’s family was housed temporarily with relatives in Brandenburg, not far from Berlin. Shortly after their arrival Frau Pfeffer’s mother died and Frau Pfeffer was hospitalized with typhus for three months. In 1951 she moved from Brandenburg to East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where she was trained and employed as a nurse. She stayed unmarried all her life and had no children.

Frau König, 85 years old when I interviewed her, was born and raised in Pomerania. At the end of the war she worked as a Red Cross nurse in a military hospital in Poznan very close to the Eastern Front. She was 18 years old at the time. When Russian soldiers marched into the city in early 1945 she was captured. She had to walk in a trek of detainees eastward and was then transported by train to a labor camp in the Soviet Union in Ukraine. During the period of her internment she had to endure sexual violence by Russian soldiers and officers several times. When the internees became sick with typhus the Russian army sent them away with the message “the one who is sick, cannot work, should go home”. Together with a friend she walked back to Pomerania in 1947, which was a long and dangerous journey. However, when she arrived at her parents’ farm she could not stay; her parents were already gone. With the expulsion of the German population she was brought to West Germany in autumn 1947, where she was united with her parents and her brother in a city where the family members of her father lived. She married her first husband within two years after her arrival, with whom she had two daughters. She stayed home to care for the children, the household and the big garden. In her late forties, after the death of her husband she began to work as a nurse for the elderly. She got married a second time and lived together with her second husband for 15 years before he died as well. Since the death of her second husband Frau König lives alone.

Frau Christ, 80 years old, is the youngest of my interviewees. She was born and raised in East Prussia. When the Eastern Front arrived in her home town, Frau Christ, her mother and her younger siblings hid in the basement. They could not flee earlier because of the cold winter and the young age of her siblings. When Russian soldiers marched into the city, her mother was first raped by Russian soldiers, and then Frau Christ was also raped by two Russian soldiers. She was 12 years old

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at the time. When the soldiers tried to rape her again, a Russian officer stopped them and advised the family to flee to the countryside. Frau Christ, her siblings and mother survived the last month of the war and the year 1945 in empty houses in the countryside, nurtured by what they found in the fields and nature. The mother of Frau Christ had to endure more sexual violence from Russian soldiers and officers; she even got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. The baby died from malnutrition within four months after being born. Furthermore, two of Frau Christ’s younger brothers died from diphtheria in 1945. In the spring of 1946 the family managed to travel to West Germany by train together with other Germans who were expelled from East Prussia. In a refugee camp the family was reunited with their father and they settled in north-west Germany. Frau Christ studied Theology and Latin and became a pastor. She married and later divorced from her first husband. In the late 1960’s she studied again, this time social pedagogy. She married her second husband, also a pastor and adopted a daughter. Her second husband has died and she lives alone.

Sexual violence in war and the difficulties to talk about it

Sexual violence against women occurs in probably every war or conflict situation (Zipfel 2001). It is a phenomenon that occurs in every society even in the absence of war or conflict (Henry et al. 2004). The militarization of society, the use of violence as an instrument of power and impunity for the perpetrators of such violence are typical circumstances of conflict and war that can lead to a higher frequency of sexual violence. Within the military culture of casernes and the front masculinity is constructed as dominant and opposed to a dominated femininity; this unequal gender relations facilitates sexual violence against women in wartime (Seifert 1999). In most of the cases the sexual violence is perpetrated by male soldiers against the civilian female population. Sexual violence can be used against the civilian population as a strategic weapon of war to control, terrorize, and chase populations out of their villages, towns and countries (Stark and Wessells 2012).

Seifert (1996: 35) emphasizes that 'war crimes against women have a symbolic meaning and must be analyzed within the symbolic contexts of the nation and the gender system’. The female body can be seen as a symbol for the nation, which is under attack or vulnerable during conflict situations and times of war (Seifert 1996; Olujic 1998). Hence, female bodies can become the battleground that male soldiers intrude, conquer and occupy. Raping women of the enemy becomes a message of victory among soldiers (Seifert 1996: 39; Olujic 1998: 39). This symbolism makes sense within a gender system where women are associated with passivity and vulnerability and seen as potential victims, whereas men are constructed as active with the capacity to harm and to protect

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(Eifler 1999: 158). Men are constructed as the perpetrators of and the protectors of sexual violence against women. In this symbolism, norms and values about female sexuality, such as that a women has to be chaste and protected by a man, play an important role. The honor of the woman as well as the honor of her family is jeopardized by the act of sexual violence, since the woman’s sexuality was controlled by the men of the enemy and not by her male family members. Often women who have been raped are directly or indirectly accused of complicity (Schmidt-Harzbach 1984). The reaction to sexual violence is shame that is ascribed to and often felt by the women. These gender systems and norms and values about female sexuality are culturally constructed and this symbolism does not necessarily apply everywhere, although it can be found in many societies.11

On the individual level, sexual violence is described by Seifert (1996) as an attack on the physical and psychological integrity of the victim and as a deprivation of the victim’s control over his or her own body. What a lot of scholars agree on is that the person who is being raped, experiences powerlessness. Price (2001) and Seifert (1996) even compare rape with torture. Sexual violence can also be understood as psychological trauma.12 In this respect the experience of rape, the feeling of

fear, powerlessness and the violation of personal integrity are understood as traumatizing for the person who is being raped (Brison 2002; Eichhorn and Kuwert 2011; Kuwert et al. 2010; Tankink 2009).

Keeping silent about what has happened is a very common reaction amongst victims of sexual violence, in wartime as well as in times of peace.13 There are different possible explanations

for that silence. From a psychological perspective, the trauma can be a reason for the woman to stay silent. Remaining silent about traumatizing experiences is a reaction often seen amongst survivors (Tankink 2009). In the symbolic analysis of sexual violence, the shame ascribed to the woman and the defeat of the men from the group the women belongs to, make talking about it difficult (Zipfel, 2001). Whether a woman speaks about the sexual violence she experienced or not also depends on

11 Olujic (1998) describes this symbolism for sexual violence committed in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and

Das (1996) illustrates it in her work on the sexual violence committed during the Partition of India and

Pakistan. In the literature on sexual violence against German women this gender system and symbolism is also described for (post war) Germany by Eifler (1999), Schmidt-Harzbach (1984) and Heineman (1996; 2001).

12 The concept of trauma was adopted from the medical field and developed further in the psychological and

psychiatric disciplines. Here trauma is often associated with posttraumatic stress disorder, as described in the DSM-VI and the ICD-10. In the ICD-10 trauma is being described as an experience of extraordinary threat of catastrophic dimension, which would cause despair in almost everybody. Examples that are given of such an experience are natural disaster, man-made disaster, severe accident, torture, murder, terrorism or rape. Alongside the traumatic experience, the DSM-VI describes feelings of intense fear, helplessness and horror as the definition of a psychological trauma (Eichhorn and Kuwert 2011: 33).

13 One German study about (sexual) violence against women shows that 47% of the women who had

experienced sexual violence had never talked about it with somebody and only 5% of cases of sexual violence is being reported to the police by women (Müller and Schröttle 2004).

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available memory discourses to communicate these experiences. The woman’s societal position and the social relations in which she is enmeshed are of great importance for her possibilities to talk about sexual violence. If a woman occupies a societal position that does not allow her to

communicate her experiences of sexual violence without jeopardizing her social relations, she might stay silent. Zipfel (2001) describes the societal practice of treating (wartime) rape as a public secret, which is spoken about without naming what is being discussed and who is being affected by it. She states that this only contributes to the atmosphere of shame which is imposed on the women and which isolates them and hinders them from defending themselves against the injustice. ‘In a weird twist they become culprits, responsible for the violated honor of their family or their community’ (Zipfel 2001: 7). This societal practice, enforced by dominant memory discourses of the violent past, can be observed in both German post-war societies.

Competing memory discourses in postwar Germany

Different dominant memory discourses on WWII developed in the two German states that were founded in 1949. Whether and how the sexual violence committed against German women was represented in these memory discourses was closely connected with the way in which the questions of the guilt and victimhood of Germany were handled.

German Democratic Republic

In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), founded on the territory of the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ)14 the dominant discourse on how to deal with the violent past of The Third Reich was

characterized by a focus on the future of socialism (Eifler 1999). Political elites were more interested in the building of a socialist state than in the exposure and clarification of German war crimes against the Jewish population and other groups. For this purpose the past was re-interpreted as the communist and socialist fight against fascism and Nazism (Fulbrook 1999: 94). Attention to the sexual violence committed against German women in the postwar years was intrinsically influenced by the political ligation of the new political regime with the Soviet Union. The women who were raped by Russian soldiers were not acknowledged as victims of war. The only support they received was medical care for sexually transmitted diseases and the possibility for an abortion in case of a pregnancy, which was accompanied by difficulties and extensive bureaucracy (Eifler 1999: 167).15

The powerful socialist party ‘Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands – SED’ was against abortion.

14 SBZ is the German acronym for ‘Sowjetische Besatzungszone’.

15 For more research on abortion after sexual violence in postwar Germany, see Grossmann (1995) and Sander

& Johr (1992).

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Women were expected to comply with their quasi-natural responsibility towards society as mothers of the future state (Eifler 1999: 168). In this regard, Eifler (1999:171) describes how the political elite trivialized the massive perpetration of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers against

German women until 1947. Socialist-communist politicians tried to appease the conflict around the sexual violence with public debates in 1948, where anti-Soviet attitudes were to be discussed. These debates were highly politicized, and the personal grievances and problems of the women that had been raped were marginalized in these debates. The experiences of sexual violence held by German women were transformed and represented in these public debates into insignificant, personal problems (Eifler 1999: 172-173). Politicians emphasized the supposed ideological superiority of the Russian soldiers and warned of forgetting German war crimes committed during WWII. In truth, the political elite was not interested in uncovering the war crimes that had been committed by the Wehrmacht and the SS, which included sexual violence against women; they merely used the argument of the German historical guilt as an instrument to silence women’s accounts of sexual violence (Mühlhäuser 2008: 3).

This public, though marginal attention for the sexual violence committed during and shortly after WWII was followed by a long period of forced silence (Eifler 1999). Silence about sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers became a part of the dominant memory discourse about WWII and the state expected the survivors to forget and forgive these violent acts.16 However, the

accounts of sexual violence against German women were not the only ones to be silenced within dominant memory discourses of the political elite in the GDR. The accounts of violence committed against the German population during their flight and expulsion from the former Eastern German territories and the occupied territories in the East were equally oppressed. The almost four million Germans who fled or were expelled to the SBZ were officially called ‘resettlers’17 and not refugees or

expellees, as they were called in the other three occupation zones and the later founded Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). These so-called resettlers had no rights for compensation in any way, whereas expellees who settled in the FRG received compensation from 1952 onwards.18 Frau

Pfeffer, who came from East Prussia in the year 1945 and moved to East Berlin, had experiences of sexual violence as well as experiences of violent expulsion. Her personal memories about these experiences were contested by the dominant and official memory discourses on WWII in the SBZ and the GDR.

16 Eifler (1999) describes how politicians reacted to women’s accounts of sexual violence during a public

debate in 1948. Women were openly requested to constrain their feelings about the violent acts.

17 German term: Umsielder

18 Compensation was regulated by the ‘Lastenausgleichsgesetz’, a law to ‘balance the burden’, see

http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/lag/. It was only after the unification of Germany in the year 1990 that refugees and expellees living in the former GDR received compensation for lost property.

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The memory policy of the SBZ and the GDR stood in contrast to the socialist women’s policy. Within socialist ideology women were not meant to take back their traditional roles from before the war but to take on the socialist role of the working mother. Women and men were formally given the same chances on the employment market, earned the same wages and were given the same rights within marriage. Education and training programs aimed at women were initiated and the state tried to let the employment of women rise. The political elite of the SBZ tried to anticipate and embrace the important role that women had to perform in societal life during and after the war, and included them into the rebuilding process (Eifler 1999: 165). Women were not seen as (potential) victims of sexual violence. However, even though femininity was not solely associated with passivity and vulnerability in this gender system, it was still associated with attributes like subordination,

diligence, modesty, motherliness and thankfulness for the paternalistic care of the state (Eifler 1999: 166). Even though in the formal political ideology of socialism women and men were equal, the gender constructions and lived reality were full of inequality (Garraio 2010: 14).

Federal Republic of Germany

In the American, British and French occupation zones and the later founded Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) the public attention given to sexual violence committed by allied soldiers was very different from that given in the SBZ and the GDR. Schmidt-Harzbach (1984: 62) describes how, at first, sexual violence was a collective experience, which was discussed among women, sometimes even within sarcastic jokes .19 However, these explicit exchanges about experiences of sexual

violence among German women stopped with the return of their men from the war. That “their” women had been victims of sexual violence was seen as a humiliation for the returning men, which made public discussion of the violence very difficult (Mühlhäuser 2008: 4).

The literature highlights three developments in the public reactions to the sexual violence: the use of sexual violence for the construction of a German victim discourse; the use of abstract rape stories for anti-communist propaganda; and the denial of a victim status for the survivors. In the first years after WWII a German victim-discourse was developed in public debate in the Western

occupation zones. The majority of the German population experienced the denazification conducted by the allied occupational forces and the Nuremberg trials as unfair and unnecessarily harsh

(Fulbrook 1999). Within the victim discourse the sexual violence against German women was

19 This was not only the case in the later West Germany but is frequently described for Berlin as well. It has to

be mentioned that not all women could and would talk about the sexual violence they experienced in the exceptional circumstances of the end of the war. Many women were so affected by the violence that they committed suicide afterwards or even before they would fall into the hands of potential perpetrators of sexual violence (Jacobs 2009).

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transformed into a desexualized, national experience of German society as a victim: seduced and misled by Hitler and occupied and punished by the Allied forces (Heineman 2001: 160). Heineman states, ‘as stories of victimization came to constitute national memory, they functioned ever less effectively in describing a female experience’ (Heineman 1996: 373-374). In the German victim discourse the attention was focused on Russian perpetrators of sexual violence, where racist and xenophobic terminology was used, as the soldiers were described as uncivilized Russians with Asian appearance (Mühlhäuser 2008: 4). These racial stereotypes, maintained from the Third Reich, were also mobilized in the national election campaigns of the CDU in 1949 and for anti-Soviet propaganda during the Cold War (Heineman 2001: 158). Also in the western occupation zones the only care women received was medical treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and abortions.20

Grossmann (1995) describes how the rapes were treated as a medical question, where penicillin and abortions were seen to resolve the problems. Frau Pfeffer and Frau König both reported that they were obligated to undergo gynecological examinations. In the SBZ, Frau Pfeffer received a call from the local administration for an obligatory examination; in the British occupation zone Frau König was urged to see a doctor by her landlady for whom she worked as a housemaid. The landlady phrased the examination as “in the interest of all of us”. Mühlhäuser (2001: 402) stresses that abortions were often approved with the well-being of the returning husband in mind, who couldn’t handle a child of the enemy. The official institutions often denied the women who had been raped an individual status as a victim of war (Mühlhäuser 2008: 4). Even though women could theoretically make a claim for financial benefit as war victims, only permanent damage of the women’s health that caused a reduction in earning capacity was compensated. Immaterial damage was not compensated (Sander and Johr 199: 78).

One goal of the postwar politics of the Allied occupational forces in West Germany was the return to “normal” family structures in the German population (Mühlhäuser 2008: 3). This process of normalization actually disguised a process of re-masculinization. Men were meant to take back their positions as head of the family and to return to employment. During the 1940’s and 1950’s many West German women lost their employment and men were hired in their place. Their hard work in the years after the war and the admiration for the symbol of the ‘Trümmerfrau’21 had no positive

impact on the position of West German women on the labor market. Gender-inequality on the labor

20 The article §218 that regulated abortion was widely abrogated or bypassed by pragmatic doctors and

administrators in the year 1945 to approve and perform abortions (Mühlhäuser 2001: 402). Grossmann analyzed the abortion request of German women who had been raped by a foreigner, and identified social, medical but also racist motivations for the request as well the approval (Grossmann 1995).

21 German women who cleaned the bombed cities of rubble (partly voluntarily, often forced) were known as

‘Trümmerfrauen’ (‘Women of the rubble’) and became a symbol for the stamina of the German population and for the reconstruction.

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market was maintained and young women were excluded from many occupational careers and apprenticeships (Heineman 2001: 164). The role of women in the times of the ‘Witschaftswunder’ was one of a mother at home, taking care of the children, the house and the well-being of her husband. Frau König’s biography is a very typical example of the lives of the majority of West

German women after the war. She had no finished apprenticeship when she got married; she stayed home and was financially completely dependent on her husband. Also Frau Ahorn, although she worked full time as a nurse, found an apprenticeship and employment in a profession typically performed by women. Frau Christ’s biography is the most exceptional one among the four biographies: she studied and became a pastor. During the interview she remembered many situations in her professional life where she felt discriminated against as a woman and hindered by the dominant position of men within society. Generally very few women had powerful positions in West German post-war society and thereby had little influence on public debates until the 1980’s. Only at the end of the 1980’s the percentage of female members of Parliament in the FRG rose above 10 % in order to climb slowly up to 39 % in 2013.22 In in West Germany only 5 % of the

university professors were women in 1980 and this percentage only began to rise from the 1990’s up to 20 % in 2013.23

While the personal accounts of sexual violence of West-German woman had been silenced in daily post-war life rather soon, the abstract rape stories also became discredited, together with the national victim discourse in the 1960’s (Garraio 2010: 5). Public debates that focused more on the guilt of Germany for the Holocaust and other war crimes started to establish itself in West Germany from the late 1960’s onwards. The acknowledgement of guilt did not immediately go together with research to investigate and uncover these crimes. Over the following decades different competing memory discourses have dominated in different fields and in different political camps as the society developed. While the ‘New Left’ wanted to come to terms with the individual guilt of their parents and grandparents from the late 1960’s onwards (Mühlhäuser 2008: 4), the new conservative elite coming to power in the 1980’s was more interested in ending the established way of coming to terms with the past.24 Especially on the political and intellectual level heated debates were held

about the question of how best to deal with the violent past of WWII. The most famous debate is the “historians’ dispute” (Historikerstreit) held between 1986 and 1989 between left-wing and right-wing associated intellectuals about German war crimes. One important question that was discussed

22 See: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frauenanteil_im_Deutschen_Bundestag_seit_1949. 23 See: http://www.gesis.org/cews/fileadmin/cews/www/statistiken/18_d.gif.

24 The Chancellor Helmut Kohl emphasized the ‘mercy of the one being born late’ which should exonerate the

generations of Germans born after 1930 from the guilt of WWII and the Holocaust (Die Gnade des Spätgeborenen) and he aspired the dropping of a collective feeling of guilt. These aspirations were highly criticized as refusal to carry the historical responsibility.

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in the dispute was the comparability of German war crimes and especially the Holocaust. Left-wing intellectuals insisted on the singularity of the Holocaust and unmasked revisionist motivations behind the comparison of Nazi crimes with the war crimes of the Soviet Union. The strong focus on guilt and responsibility continued to characterize the dominant official memory discourse of WWII in West Germany (Assmann 2006: 198).

On the 8th of May, 1985, for the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the end of

WWII, the German Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker held a remarkable speech, which was maybe ahead of the times. He addressed the diversity of German experiences at the end of the war. Although he recognized the suffering of the German population, including women who had been raped, and he acknowledged German war crimes without falling into revisionism, he also confirmed the taboo on talking about sexual violence. Weizsäcker had a specific interpretation of the women’s role, namely as mothers and wives who held together the social fabric during and after the war. That this role forced the women to stay silent about their personal experiences of sexual violence for the sake of the social fabric has become clear. It were feminist scholars, who started to work on sexual violence and the gendered experience of war from the 1980’s onwards, who tried to give voice to the silenced women’s experiences (Schmidt-Harzbach 1984; Sander and Johr 1992).25

In 2003 memory discourses about German civil suffering became very popular in the reunited Federal Republic of Germany (Assmann 2006). Memories of flight and expulsion, of carpet bombing and sexual violence against women were represented in books, interviews, documentaries and movies.26 Assmann (2006:189) describes how in that year, memories of civil suffering, although

not new, found a way into public discourse where they had not been represented before. The disconnection between private memory and official remembrance in postwar Germany had held these memories in the sphere of the families (Assmann 2006: 190). Assmann argues that ‘only now that a social framework and discourse has come into existence in which German sufferings dating back to the Second World War can be separated from reactionary and revisionist arguments and, freed of the danger of political exploitation, do they have a chance to be heard with empathy.’ (Assmann 2006: 198). This is not to say that these memory discourses about German suffering are not contested anymore nowadays, but to recognize that heterogeneous memories tend to be better tolerated next to each other in the German public debate about WWII. Memories about sexual

25 Mühlhäuser (2008) criticizes these publications because the attempts to explain sexual violence did not go

much further than to accuse the patriarchal power relations in society and because the ahistorical approach fails to contextualize the sexual violence into the complex picture of WWII.

26 Books like “Der Brand” by Jörg Friedrich (2002), the novel “Im Krebsgang” by Günther Grass (2002), the

documentary series “Die grosse Flucht” by Guido Knopp (2001), and the newly published anonymous dairy “Anonyma. Eine Frau in Berlin” (2003) are the most well-known examples of the attention given to the suffering of German civil population during WWII.

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violence against German women committed by Russian soldiers during and shortly after WWII were highly contested. This does not mean that all German women who have been raped could never talk about these experiences throughout their lives. Many women stayed silent but some women did make their experiences explicit. Four of these women told me why, when and how they

communicated their experiences of sexual violence and when and why they decided to conceal them.

Silence - nobody asked, nobody wanted to hear

Silence within families

All four women reported periods of silence about their experiences of sexual violence. They described that for many decades after the war they had nobody in their surroundings that they could talk to about these experiences. They could not even talk about what had happened to them with their own family members, who had witnessed the moments when the Russian soldiers fetched away the young girls and women to rape them. They all missed appreciative listeners. The women described a tendency within their families to move forward and to suppress the violent past. Frau Pfeffer narrated how she could not talk with her father, her brother or other family members about her experiences and her suffering:

Frau Pfeffer: But I…with such a … I could have never came to him with such a story! Or tell how I am or what I think or feel .

Interviewer: You couldn’t talk with him? Frau Pfeffer: No. (…)

Interviewer: And with your brother you couldn’t talk neither? Frau Pfeffer: No, neither. Ah no, that wasn’t possible at all! Interviewer: And the relatives in N. ?

Frau Pfeffer: Neither! And later they joined the New Apostolic Church.

Yet, staying silent about their experiences of sexual violence should not be seen as solely imposed on the women but also as an agentive act of the women. The young women were

daughters and sisters who wanted to preserve their family ties. They grew up with strong notions of respect towards their parents. Frau Ahorn and Frau Pfeffer grew up in strict religious families, where sexuality could not be discussed at all. Some of the women were still minors after the war and therefore still under parental custody. The young women might have endangered their social

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relationships within their families if they had made their experiences explicit in rebellion against the practice of suppression.

Silence within love relationships and marriages

Silence about the experiences of sexual violence was also an established practice within love relationships and marriages. Frau König and Frau Christ never spoke with their first husbands about their experiences of sexual violence. They described their first husbands as having little empathy for their wives. Both women were highly discouraged by the attitudes of their husbands to disclose their experiences. Frau König told me that she will never forget a comment her first husband made, in which he argued that all the women who had been raped by soldiers had to blame it on themselves. Such accusations against women were very prevalent back then and emerge also in contemporary discourses around sexual violence (Schmidt-Harzbach 1984; Zipfel 2001). The public discourse on sexuality was very inhibited and prudish in the 1950’s and the 1960’s. Discussing questions of

sexuality was very difficult between men and women in that period. In that context it was even more difficult for women to disclose their experiences of sexual violence to their husbands. But also here the silence of the women should not be seen as a complete lack of agency. Frau Christ for example described her silence as a strategy of self-protection even though she felt the silence as imposed on her in the first place:

Frau Christ: Well, otherwise I could not have lived I believe, when it was so in the foreground, when I wouldn’t have suppressed it.

Interviewer: Thus seeing this clearly as protection of oneself?

Frau Christ: Yes, I do think so, I do think so. I couldn’t have.. like being able to open up to a man, so I had to…

Staying silent was an agentive act of Frau Christ in her personal project of finding a partner and maintaining a sexual relationship.

Silence about sexual violence was also described as prevalent in more equal relationships. Frau König described her second marriage as a relationship full of trust and care for each other. Although she never disclosed her experiences of sexual violence explicitly, she told me that she assumed her husband had probably worked out what had happened to her. He always calmed her down, when she woke up screaming from the nightmares she has had since the violence. Within their marriage she and her husband agreed that they would only cuddle. Also Frau Christ described her second husband as more understanding than her first husband. Since he did not want to talk

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about his experiences during the war, she respected his whish and did not dig deeper in his memories but also kept her own experiences silent. She described their sexual life as problematic but according to her they loved each other, and that was the most important thing.

Staying silent about the experiences within marriages did take different forms. Within their first marriages Frau Christ and Frau König could not have expected to receive acknowledgement for their painful experiences and memories, so they stayed silent. From their second husbands they received a certain acknowledgement and care even without disclosing their experiences in an explicit manner.

Silence in the public debate

The women also described how silence about experiences of sexual violence had been a practice in the public spheres. Whereas Frau Pfeffer remembered the period directly after the war as a time in which she could talk with other refugee girls about similar experiences of sexual violence and

expulsion, she described how some months after the expulsion she and others stopped talking about it and started to forget. This was in 1946. Her account confirms findings of Mühlhäuser (2001) and Heineman (2001) that women’s accounts of sexual violence fell silent several months after the war. Frau Pfeffer was an expellee from East Prussia, living in the SBZ; her account of wartime rape and her violent expulsion was a marginalized one. But also in the Western occupation zones women and girls were discouraged from talking about their experiences of sexual violence in public. Frau Ahorn described how she felt that staying silent about experiences of sexual violence was expected from her, but that she also chose to not talk about her experiences of the flight and the time of the internment after having started her new life in Berlin: ‘One has to put it aside. One has to say, “This is over and done”, right?’

Frau Christ described her silence about her experience of sexual violence as imposed on her in the first place. Teachers explicitly forbade her to speak about her experiences. This was after she had written an essay about her experiences of sexual violence for a writing competition, organized by a magazine in 1947. She won the competition and the magazine contacted her school principle, who handed over the prize: a fountain pen. Afterwards her female art teacher accompanied her on her way home, questioned her about the experiences she had described and told her that she should never talk to someone about it again. Frau Christ’s story portrays what was typical for the situation of women and girls shortly after the war in the Western occupation zones. On the one hand stories about flight and rape were in demand and were transformed into a metaphor of national victimhood within the victim discourse that developed in West Germany (Eifler 2001: 160); on the other hand

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the personal accounts of women and girls who had been raped were tabooed and silenced (Mühlhäuser 2001: 408). Frau Christ described the long period of silence about the experience of sexual violence as caused by a strong double taboo on talking about sexuality and on talking about the suffering of Germans caused by WWII:

I always say: ‘We were allowed to be perpetrators, but not victims’, right? Because we had been such bad perpetrators, we cannot present ourselves as victims. That’s the backdrop, I think.

The dominant official memory discourse in West Germany was focused on the guilt of German war crimes and was very critical about ideas of German victimhood from the late 1960’s onwards. Assmann (2006) describes how memory discourses focused on guilt and memory discourses acknowledging German suffering were positioned as adverse towards each other and seemed incompatible. The difficulty felt by many Germans to speak as victims who suffered during WWII, without feeling that they are denying or minimizing Nazi war crimes, was very present in the accounts of Frau König. She even apologized for complaining about her suffering with the backdrop of the German war crimes, when she recounted her experiences of sexual violence towards me. During the interview she spoke about how her upbringing and education had been characterized by the national socialist ideology. She described herself as a stupid young woman who was completely indoctrinated back then. She reported about her father being a mayor in occupied Pomerania. Although she did not mention specific acts of her father it is very assumable that he had been responsible for cruel acts during the war. After the war she developed a strong awareness of the Nazi war crimes. The awareness of her ideological indoctrination, her own participation in the war as a Red Cross nurse, and her father’s acts during the war could have formed partly the reasons for her silence about her experiences of sexual violence. During the interview she talked about these experiences for the first time.

Dealing with the experiences – written and spoken words

Despite the periods of silence all four women did find discourses to make their experiences of sexual violence explicit and to communicate them to an audience. One of the motivations for the women to do so was the urge to deal with their violent experiences. Their dealing with the experiences was driven by the wish to unburden oneself, the aim to seek acknowledgement from sympathetic audiences and the attempt to come to terms with the experiences and their aftermath.

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Telling for the first time

Unburdening herself and finding relief was what Frau König aimed for, when she made her

experiences of sexual violence explicit for the first time; she did that during our interview, 67 years after the violence had taken place. When I met her, she was living alone and she had nobody to take care of anymore. She reported that throughout her life she had always taken care of a family member or a partner. She had taken care of her father-in-law, her own father, her daughter who died after a long period of illness, and finally her second husband. Now that she was living alone she missed the exchanges with her loved ones but she also had the chance to express her personal pain without breaking the silence she used to maintain in front of her loved ones. No personal

relationships were put at risk by her disclosing her experiences of sexual violence during the interview. She said that she had never managed to open up about it before and that she could now talk to me because of an inexplicable feeling of trust towards me. At that moment I was an

appreciative listener for her, acknowledging her suffering without having a personal relationship with her that could be endangered by her disclosure. She let me know that she felt relieved after she had talked to me about her experiences.

Writing down what happened

Frau Pfeffer remembered that even though she could exchange her experiences of her flight, her expulsion from East Prussia and even the experience of sexual violence with other refugee girls shortly after the war, these conversations remained on a superficial level. She felt like she could not unburden herself in these exchanges. In 1946 she decided to write down her experiences in a diary and describes this writing as a way to come to terms with her experiences at that moment:

That is how I came to terms with it, and good that I did it, also today, you can see… I did deal with it for myself. I would have gone crazy. You have to imagine it: Homeland lost, mother lost, having been raped, in the hospital with typhus, I am lying there for three months…

Frau Pfeffer’s way to make her experiences explicit was not aimed, in the first instance, at an audience. It was only later that she used her diary writings to seek recognition as an expellee from East Prussia.

Writing about her experiences was also the form in which Frau Ahorn chose to make them explicit. However, after she had dealt with her violent experiences, mainly through not talking about them, she decided to make them explicit, 50 years after she had been raped. After a journey to

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North Eastern Prussia, today the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast, where her home village was situated, she started to write an autobiographical book. At that time she was already retired and her parents and her brother had died. She was not bound anymore to the spheres within which she had stayed silent about her experiences of sexual violence. She movingly recounted how her husband and son encouraged her to write about her experiences of the flight and her internment and showed her a lot of support in that emotional period:

Yes and it was Christmas, I believe ’95, I suddenly had the idea, ‘you have to write about it…because everything is getting lost’...Well…[she tears up] and then both men said: ‘… you can start right away’, that is what I did and ’97 I believe the book was published

While she describes her motivations for writing this book not so much as a personal wish to deal with her experiences, she nevertheless received attention and acknowledgement from her loved ones in the process of making her experiences explicit. Within her nuclear family she could change the way she dealt with her experiences and made them explicit towards her husband and son before she published her book and started to speak about her past to various audiences.

Trauma therapy – finding a new discourse

After having been silenced as a schoolgirl in 1947, Frau Christ only made her experiences of sexual violence explicit again 50 years later during trauma therapy at the end of the 1990’s. Frau Christ decided to start the therapy as a follow-up care after an operation to remove breast cancer tumors from both of her breasts. During this three-year therapy she was confronted with her difficult experiences during and after the war, which were re-interpreted as traumatic events. Frau Christ talked and wrote about those events including the rape by the two soldiers and summarized her therapy reports in short texts and poems. She described the years of therapy as a very difficult period but one that had brought her good things. During her therapy she learned to see herself as a traumatized person and by that she learned to understand her behavior and her body better. She started to reinterpret her physical symptoms of illness as a form of dealing with trauma in a somatic way. She described how she sees illness as a way towards healing from trauma. For her, breast cancer was another cry for help from her body, which she finally had heard. She furthermore

explained that when she had her uterus removed many years before, she was still deaf to this cry for help. The trauma discourse had given Frau Christ an opportunity to make her experiences of sexual violence explicit and to come to terms with them. She started the therapy during her second marriage, in which she felt supported, and after having studied social work during the late 1960’s.

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