Funded with the generous support of Warwick's Humanities Research Centre.

This is an interdisciplinary workshop series dedicated to all areas of German cultural studies. Meeting two to three times during term in the Department of German Studies or online, the workshop hosts presentations on a Wednesday afternoon by senior national and international scholars, Warwick colleagues and doctoral students. Presentations can be delivered both as finished conference-style papers, or more informally as work-in-progress. Please contact the workshop convenor, thomas dot crew at warwick dot ac dot uk, if you wish to offer or attend a presentation.

WWIGS 2024-25

Please note: Days and times vary, please see below

Term 1

 

Wednesday 20 November, 4:30-6pm, FAB4.79

Katherine Stone (Warwick)

'Slaves and Objects of Amusement: West German Women under the Yoke of the American Colonizers': Sexual Violence, Moral Indignation and Propaganda in Cold-War East Germany

By now, it is well established that memories of Soviet violence against women sustained anti-Communist sentiment in the Federal Republic, while the crimes of the western Allies were downplayed. The fact that East German memories were similarly dualistic has received limited attention. Scholars have focused instead on the copious evidence that violence perpetrated by members of the Red Army was politically taboo. In this paper, I argue that there was nonetheless space in public discourse to remember German women as victims of wartime sexualized violence—as long as the perpetrators represented the Western Allies. In fact, I demonstrate that sexual violence was a particularly sticky sign in the affective economy of anti-imperialism. To begin, I will show how the topic of rape by US soldiers was harnessed in journalistic propaganda to induce moral indignation towards the western Allies as embodiments of a cruel, exploitative, and morally inferior political system. I then zoom in on Werner Steinberg’s Deutschland-Zyklus (1957-1965), which is unique in the literature of both Germanies for its extended exploration of conflict-related sexualized violence in all its forms. It remains one of the few works of post-war culture to give voice to the victim-survivor and continue her story beyond the moment of violence. Ultimately, however, I argue that there was no reception framework in which the individual story of sexual violence could accrue emotional and memorial capital. All that mattered in Cold War propaganda was the baseness of the perpetrator and the ideological system that he represented.