mothers of the nation: right-wing women in weimar germany

Mothers of the Nation

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Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany

Raffael Scheck

Oxford • New York

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Dedicated to Anselm and Adelia Scheck

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First published in 2004 byBerg

Editorial offices:First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK

838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003–4812, USA

© Raffael Scheck 2004

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced in any formor by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataScheck, Raffael, 1960–

Mothers of the nation : right-wing women in Weimar Germany/Raffael Scheck. ––1st ed.

p. cm.ISBN 1-85973-707-2 –– ISBN 1-85973-712-9 (paper)1. Women in politics––Germany––History––20th century. 2. Deutsche

Volkspartei (Germany) 3. Deutschnationale Volkspartei. 4. Germany––Politics and government––1918–1933. 5. National socialism and women. I. Title.

HQ1236.5.G3S33 2004320'.082'0943––dc22

2003019625

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 85973 707 2 (Cloth)1 85973 712 9 (Paper)

Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, BucksPrinted in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn.

www.bergpublishers.com

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Contents

Preface ix

List of Abbreviations xv

1. Introduction 1

2. Women’s Entry into Party Politics 23

3. Hostility to Women in Politics 49

4. Women’s Rights and Housewives’ Power 65

5. Family, Youth, and Morality 85

6. Small Rentiers 107

7. Foreign Policy 117

8. Women’s Local Politics 137

9. The Nazi Challenge 157

Conclusion 183

Reference Sources 187

Bibliography 191

Index 225

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Preface

This book examines the work of women in the German People’s Party (DVP) andthe German National People’s Party (DNVP) – parties that covered the rangefrom the moderate to the radical right of the Weimar Republic. Unlike the NaziParty (NSDAP), these parties offered women seats in the national and localparliaments and in the party leadership. The book introduces the leading womenfrom these two parties and traces the organizational structures that they createdon the national and local level. It further analyzes their policies in fields rangingfrom social welfare to foreign policy and ends with a discussion of their reactionto the dramatic growth of the Nazi Party after 1930. The central theme is thewomen politicians’ attitude toward interest politics. Mothers of the Nation showsthat right-wing women, in keeping with the tradition of the German bourgeoiswomen’s movement, refused to stand up primarily for women’s interests andinstead invoked the Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people), a vision ofharmony and cooperation of the groups involved in production. They believedthat German women should use their newly won political rights to strengthen theVolksgemeinschaft by reconciling the divided nation and by infusing it with ahigher morality. This stance helped right-wing women to achieve impressivesuccess in mobilizing conservative women, but it did not help them prevent thefragmentation along economic-interest lines that ultimately rendered theirparties defenseless against the Nazis. Most of the conservative women mobilizedby the DVP and DNVP (over a third of the women’s vote by 1924) sooner or latersupported the Nazis.

Until recently the study of women in the two parties that form the subject ofthis book had received little attention.1 The works by Andrea Süchting-Hängerand Kirsten Heinsohn have begun to fill this gap, however, at least for theGerman Nationalist People’s Party and some organizations associated with it.2

Julia Sneeringer’s thorough analysis of party propaganda directed towardwomen, although not limited to parties of the right, also offers importantinsights.3 Johanna Gehmacher’s book on the Austrian Großdeutsche Volksparteihas enriched the field with a study of a party that shows many similarities to thetwo parties discussed in this book, particularly the DNVP.4 Greater breadth hasbeen added to the field by studies of organizations that cooperated with the DVPand DNVP. This is true for the housewives’, colonial, anti-feminist, andEvangelical movements.5 Biographies of some right-wing women, such as Käthe

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Schirmacher, Magdalene von Tiling, and Guida Diehl, have deepened our knowl-edge, as has the study on women in German parliaments by Heide-MarieLauterer.6 Yet, there are still major gaps in the picture of right-wing womenduring the Weimar Republic, particularly with respect to women in the DVP.

The present study focuses on politics within the parties. Its most valuableprimary sources are party newspapers or newsletters. They offer articles andspeeches by the women politicians as well as a treasure trove of information onthe parties themselves, on associated women’s organizations, and on parliamen-tary proceedings. Private papers have been consulted wherever possible so as toput public pronouncements into a more critical context, and various collectionsof documents from the parties and from women’s organizations have furtherbroadened the documentary base. The divisions of the StaatsbibliothekPreußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin hold the richest deposits, including party news-papers, pamphlets, and books by the women from the two parties. Among theprivate-paper collections, the holdings of the Schirmacher Nachlass at theUniversity Library in Rostock, the Katharina (Kardorff-) von Oheimb andEduard Dingeldey papers at the Federal Archives in Koblenz, and the PaulaMueller-Otfried papers at the archive of the German Evangelical Women’sLeague were the most useful.

The structure of the book stresses first the ideological and organizationalparameters of women’s work within the two parties. The first chapter introducesthe context, background, and mind-set of the main players. The next chapterdelineates the structure of women’s politics in the two parties, and the thirdchapter is devoted to the hostility women felt from men and women in theirparties and looks at their reaction to it. Next, the book turns to the politics ofright-wing women. The following three chapters are organized thematicallyrather than chronologically because many legislative issues were debated repeat-edly from 1919 to 1930. Chapter Four focuses on women’s issues, contrasting theDVP and DNVP women’s rather limited engagement for women’s rights withtheir receptiveness to housewives’ concerns. Chapter Five deals with legislativework in social and cultural policy – areas in which nobody questioned theexpertise of women. The small-rentiers topic, covered in Chapter Six, belongs tothe same general field but warrants separate treatment because of its complexity.Chapter Seven shifts the focus away from parliamentary politics to the women’sstands on foreign policy, the one area that divided the two parties more thananything else for much of the 1920s. Chapter Eight concludes the section onwomen’s policies with a look at right-wing women’s activity at the local level toassess how national and local politics interacted. The final chapter deals with thechanged parameters of politics in the last years of the Weimar Republic and theright-wing women’s reaction to the rise of the Nazis. The conclusion then evalu-ates the effect of the female politicians’ activities and puts the results of this

Preface

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study into the context of broader questions regarding women in politics andGermany’s political culture. The focus throughout the book is on the leadingwomen who sat in the national parliament (Reichstag) and some state diets aswell as on those women who were important in the women’s committees withinthe parties. Wherever appropriate, connections will be shown to the men in theparty, particularly the leaders, and to the rank-and-file women, who are thesubject of Chapter Eight. The analysis, when involving Germany’s federal states,will concentrate most often on Prussia, which was important not only by virtueof its size (more than 60 percent of the German population and territory) but alsobecause it included most of the strongholds of the two parties.

The present study would have been inconceivable without the generosity ofarchivists, librarians, research assistants, and colleagues. The staff at theGerman Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz and Berlin were particu-larly helpful. In Koblenz, Mr. Alois Fischer helped me to go through the parties’propaganda materials, and Mr. Gregor Pickro even sent me copies of thearchive’s research guides and some documents. Members of the LandesarchivBerlin, particularly Frau Schumacher, as well as their colleagues at theGeheimes Staatsarchiv in Berlin were resourceful over many years. I am alsograteful for the hospitality and advice of members of the archives of the GermanEvangelical Women’s League in Hanover and of the Catholic Women’s Leagueof Germany in Cologne. Ulrike Gebhardt in Rostock and Kerstin Wolff of theArchive of the German Women’s Movement in Kassel generously shared theirknowledge of the field, and the staff of the Staatsbibliothek PreußischerKulturbesitz in Berlin, particularly in the old building Unter den Linden,worked tirelessly to support my research. I still feel bad about my loud Hurrahthat echoed through the reading rooms of this pristine building when one staffmember found a volume that closed a two-year gap in my research materials(the volume had been listed as missing in the catalog). I am grateful to AmyBongard for having come to Berlin with me during my sabbatical in 1997/98,and I thank the German state for its generous Erziehungsgeld that helped makeour stay affordable. Peter Scheck (my brother), Dora Wache (my step-grand-mother), my parents, and my friends Stephan March, Elke Krüger, and RudiThurner helped to make my time in Berlin one of the happiest of my life. Fortwenty years, the friendship of Stephan Scharfenberger and Marco Guerini inZurich has been a source of support and humorous inspiration.

At Colby College, several research assistants performed much appreciatedwork: Amalie Gosine, Jody Beznoska, Yuliya Komska, Kerry West, RebeccaDowning, Gregory Robinson, Camille Dugan, and Alexis Frobin (in chronolog-ical order). Yuliya Komska established a biographical database on right-wingwomen’s politicians, Kerry West counted and tabulated the members of a localDNVP branch, Gregory Robinson did much useful work on an earlier version of

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Preface

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the text, and Alexis Frobin helped getting the last version of the manuscript readyfor the publisher. The interlibrary loan librarians at Colby have done their utmostto track down some obscure texts for me. My prolific and friendly colleagues inthe History Department (Peter Ditmanson, Ben Fallaw, Paul Josephson,Elizabeth Leonard, Howard Lupovitch, Richard “Pete” Moss, Larissa Taylor, JimWebb, and Robert Weisbrot), as well as the secretaries Sarah Ward and DianneLaBreck, graciously put up with me as department chair and have created asupportive work atmosphere that has helped me to keep up my spirits. Thefunding from the Social Science Division of Colby College was critical to thisproject, as was the generously funded sabbatical.

Input from colleagues has much improved the manuscript. Subscribers to theelectronic discussion list H-GERMAN responded to my inquiries about smallrentiers and the legal ramifications of alcohol abuse in Germany. In Berlin, KarinHausen and the members of the colloquium on gender history at the TechnischeUniversität Berlin provided much appreciated criticism, as did Angelika Schaserwho also let me borrow many books from her rich private library. Nancy Reagincommented on the chapter on women’s issues and housewives’ power. UtePlanert generously shared her ideas on women and nationalism with me. EvaSchoeck-Quinteros and Christiane Streubel allowed me to present parts of thepresent work at a conference on women and nationalism at the University ofBremen in 1999 and provided important feedback. Julia Sneeringer shared withme her insights on DNVP propaganda, and Larry E. Jones on many occasionshelped me with his expertise on Weimar politics. Elizabeth Leonard, KirstenHeinsohn, Christiane Streubel, and Andrea Süchting-Hänger read the entiremanuscript and made many useful comments. A reputed historian of women inthe American Civil War and dear friend, Elizabeth Leonard used her great insightand stylistic experience to help me enhance the book’s structure and eliminateGermanisms. I also wish to thank professors Josef Mooser, Regina Wecker, andPeter Fritzsche for evaluating the manuscript as part of a Habilitation procedureat the University of Basel. Several anonymous manuscript reviewers carefullyread the manuscript and provided helpful critique. I particularly want to thankmy editor Kathleen May and Ken Bruce at Berg; they have been wonderfulexamples of professionalism and expediency. Finally, I thank my children,Anselm (8 years old) and Adelia (6), for putting up with a messy house as I wasfinishing this book and, most of all, for understanding that some professionalcommitments, including the work on this book, have occasionally prevented mefrom spending the entire day playing with them.

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Preface

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Notes

1. In an article from 1990, Helen Boak observed: “Women’s participation in theCatholic, conservative and liberal parties and these parties’ attitudes to theirfemale members have not been investigated.” (Helen Boak, “Women inWeimar Politics.” European History Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1990): 369–99).There is now good work on the Democratic Party: Angelika Schaser, HeleneLange und Gertrud Bäumer: Eine politische Lebensgemeinschaft (Cologne,Vienna, Weimar: Boehlau Verlag, 2000), and Schaser, “Bürgerliche Frauenauf dem Weg in die linksliberalen Parteien (1908–1933).” HistorischeZeitschrift 263, no. 3 (1996): 641–80.

2. Andrea Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation”: NationalesEngagement und politisches Handeln konservativer Frauenorganisationen1900 bis 1937 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002); Kirsten Heinsohn, “Im Diensteder deutschen Volksgemeinschaft: Die ‘Frauenfrage’ und konservativeParteien vor und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg.” In Ute Planert, ed., Nation,Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in derModerne. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2000. See also RaffaelScheck, “German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in the EarlyWeimar Republic.” German History 15, no. 1 (1997): 34–55; Scheck,“Women Against Versailles: Maternalism and Nationalism of FemaleBourgeois Politicians in the Early Weimar Republic.” German Studies Review22 (1999): 21–42; Scheck, “Zwischen Volksgemeinschaft und Frauenrechten:Das Verhältnis rechtsbürgerlicher Politikerinnen zur NSDAP 1930–33.” InUte Planert, ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht. Frauenbewegungen undNationalismus in der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus,2000; Scheck, “Women on the Weimar Right: The Role of Female Politiciansin the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP).” Journal of ContemporaryHistory 36, no. 4 (2001): 547–60; and Scheck, “Women in the Non-NaziRight during the Weimar Republic: The Case of the German NationalistPeople’s Party (DNVP).” In Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, eds., Right-Wing Women Across the Globe. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

3. Julia Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in WeimarGermany (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,2002).

4. Johanna Gehmacher, Völkische Frauenbewegung: Deutschnationale undnationalsozialistische Geschlechterpolitik in Österreich (Vienna: Docker,1998).

5. See the works by Nancy Reagin and Renate Bridenthal on housewives citedbelow. For colonial women, see Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire,1884–1945 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001), and for

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a history of anti-feminism that sheds much light on the contribution ofwomen to this movement, see Ute Planert, Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich:Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische Mentalität (Göttingen:Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1998). For the Protestant women’s movement, seeJochen-Christoph Kaiser, Frauen in der Kirche: Evangelische Frauenarbeitim Spannungsfeld von Kirche und Gesellschaft 1890–1945 (Düsseldorf:Schwann, 1985); Ursula Baumann, Protestantismus und Frauenemanzipationin Deutschland, 1850 bis 1920 (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus,1992); and Doris Kaufmann, Frauen zwischen Aufbruch und Reaktion:Protestantische Frauenbewegung in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts(Munich: Piper, 1988).

6. Anke Walzer, Käthe Schirmacher: Eine deutsche Frauenrechtlerin auf demWege vom Liberalismus zum konservativen Nationalismus, Frauen inGeschichte und Gesellschaft 19 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft,1991), pp. 26 and 79; Gury Schneider-Ludorff, Magdalene von Tiling:Ordnungstheologie und Geschlechterbeziehungen – Ein Beitrag zumGesellschaftsverständnis des Protestantismus in der Weimarer Republik(Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2001); Silvia Lange, ProtestantischeFrauen auf dem Weg in den Nationalsozialismus: Guida Diehls Neuland-bewegung 1916–1935, Ergebnisse der Frauenforschung 47 (Stuttgart andWeimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 1998); and Heide-Marie Lauterer,Parlamentarierinnen in Deutschland 1918/19–1949 (Königstein: UlrikeHelmer Verlag, 2002).

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List of Abbreviations

BA German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv)BDF Federation of German Women’s Associations (Bund deutscher

Frauenvereine)DDP German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei)DEF German Evangelical Women’s League (Deutsch-evangelischer

Frauenbund)DFBS German Women’s Committee against the War-Guilt Lie (Deutscher

Frauenausschuß zur Bekämpfung der Schuldlüge)DNVP German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei)DVP German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei)IAW International Alliance of WomenICW International Council of WomenLFA Provincial Women’s Committee (Landesfrauenausschuss) of the

DNVPNLC Nationalliberale CorrespondenzNSDAP Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)RFA National Women’s Committee (Reichsfrauenausschuss)RHV National Housewives’ League (Reichsverband der

Hausfrauenvereine)RLB National Rural League (Reichslandbund)RLHV National Rural Housewives’ League (Reichsverband der land-

wirtschaftlichen Hausfrauenvereine)SPD Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands)VdL Verhandlungen des Preußischen LandtagsVdR Verhandlungen des ReichstagsVEFD Federation of German Evangelical Women’s Leagues (Vereinigung

evangelischer Frauenvereine Deutschlands)VRPT Union of the Female Postal and Telegraph Workers (Verband der

deutschen Reichspost- und Telegraphenbeamtinnen)WkFA Electoral District Women’s Committee (Wahlkreisfrauenausschuss) of

the DVP

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Introduction

Nationalism has drawn women into a dialectic process. On the one hand, it hasheld out the promise of participation and entitlement. Nationalism is about thepeople, about men and women. Beginning with le peuple of the FrenchRevolution, it has pulled women into the political process and by doing so hasslowly eroded the legitimacy of law codes that discriminate against women. Onthe other hand, nationalism has often reaffirmed traditional gender divisions andhierarchies particularly through its tendency to seek confrontation with otherpeoples and nationalisms. In national emergencies and wars, men have tradition-ally gone to the front and women have been cast back into maternal and caringroles.1 This dialectic reached a crucial stage during the First World War and itsaftermath in many European countries, particularly in Germany. The First WorldWar helped to make the boundaries between the private and the public sphereporous and thus to undermine the association of private with female and publicwith male. This happened not only through the influx of women into industrialand administrative jobs held by men. Given the prolonged absence of millions ofmen and the steadily worsening food supply due to the British blockade, womenin Germany also became the backbone of the home front, where stability andholding out mattered as much as they did in the murderous trenches. With theirsocial services, their labor, and their frugal housekeeping, women made an essen-tial contribution to the war effort.2 Right after the war, Germany’s revolutionarysocialist government recognized this contribution when it decreed the introduc-tion of women’s suffrage on 30 November 1918. Beginning with the elections tothe National Assembly on 19 January 1919, German women were for the firsttime allowed to vote and be elected in all national, state, and local elections.3

Although the suffrage broadened women’s political opportunities, themomentum for reform quickly weakened due to a reaction already visible duringthe war. The war losses and the decline of the birthrate typical for modern soci-eties heightened the role of women as bearers of children and exerted pressureon them to reproduce in the service of the nation. This happened at a time whenindividual choice was increasingly replacing religious morality in reproductiveissues and when economic constraints induced many couples to have fewer chil-dren than their parents. Given that Germany needed a large army to rise as a great

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power again, the birthrate was a national concern of the highest order.4 Moreover,the double threat from a revolutionary left and vengeful war enemies as well asthe widespread feeling of chaos and moral decline in postwar Germany mademiddle-class constituencies yearn for a reweaving of the social fabric accordingto Christian and conservative values. Women were essential for this project –particularly in their role as mothers and housewives.

The women politicians of the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei,DVP) and the German Nationalist People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei,DNVP), who are the focus of this book, generally affirmed these reactionarygoals. Yet, they also believed that the national emergency after the German defeatin 1918 had undercut the legitimation for excluding women from a range ofpolitical and social opportunities. Comparing the nation with a damaged ship ina storm, the journalist Emma Stropp (DVP) argued: “One cannot hold back thelarger part of the crew and ask them to clean the deck when it is necessary toflush the joints, hold together breaking parts, and reconstruct in a storm andemergency all that was exhausted, old, or willfully destroyed.”5 Leading right-wing women thus established a connection between the national emergency andan expansion of their rights by claiming that a beleaguered nation on the vergeof civil war could not survive without opening new opportunities to women withtheir allegedly inborn reconciling, “maternal” qualities.6 While accepting a tradi-tional definition of women as different from men, these women activists pointedout that the war had dissolved the borders between private and public sphere andthat women therefore needed to play a more public and political role. Theyargued, in historian Doris Kaufmann’s words, that the “inner front” of the war,guarded mostly by women, had become the “outer front” through Germany’smilitary collapse and disarmament.7

This book explores the main themes and activities of leading right-wingwomen in Weimar Germany. It argues, first, that the priority of these women wasto mobilize the large pool of previously politically dormant conservative women,who were told to use their new political rights to rescue the nation, unite it, andmake it strong again. Second, it shows that their self-definition and also the toolsused to achieve their mobilization goal were shaped by a belief in essentialgender differences. While reaching out to Germany’s conservative women, theleading women of the DVP and DNVP appealed to this belief and cast it in thepowerful rhetoric of Volksgemeinschaft, a term that became notorious through itsracist meaning under the Nazi regime but was used long before the Nazis and notalways in a racial context.8

Together with the majority of the German women’s movement, right-wingwomen believed that men and women are essentially different.9 Among thetypical qualities they ascribed to all women were compassion, social responsi-bility, and a refined sense of morality and culture. Women, so the theory ran,

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were more loyal to basic ideas than men and were good at mediating conflicts.They had natural moral authority and greater talent for self-restraint than men,and this made them ideally suited to preserve culture and morality. Consequently,women would, if given more political power, increase social responsibility,ennoble the tone of politics, rally the nation behind the most important issues,and raise morality and culture. These maternal qualities were assumed to existregardless of whether a woman was a mother in a biological sense. The ideaabout women’s innate maternal qualities was called “spiritual motherhood.” Thegeneral ideology of gender difference stressing these qualities was called “mater-nalism.”10

Whereas the maternalist ideology was shared by most women active in thepolitical parties of the Weimar Republic, different shadings existed with respectto its consequences for women’s roles in society. Here a more emancipatoryinterpretation competed with a more conservative one. Helene Lange andGertrud Bäumer, the key theorists of the bourgeois German women’s movementwho both joined the German Democratic Party (DDP), represented the emanci-patory position by claiming that maternalism did not justify a strict separation ofroles for women and men; women should be allowed to do almost everythingmen did, but they would do it differently, and they would thus make the sharedwork more complete than it was when carried out by men or women alone. Thisposition, though based on differences of the sexes, was reconcilable with equalstatus for women and men.11 As Anny von Kulesza, a DVP deputy in the Prussianstate diet, wrote: “To assign only certain fields to women in public and politicallife would be wrong. It will not be possible for the woman to insert into politicalwork the necessary complement to the work of the man without applying herjudgment to all fields, as is necessary given the interconnectedness of our polit-ical and economic life. In foreign policy, too, women should be heard in additionto men, even if the man may continue to make the decisions.”12 Many women onthe right, however, endorsed a more restrictive interpretation of maternalism bywanting to tie women’s political work more closely to the sphere of mothers andhousewives. These women also tended to put a higher value on biological moth-erhood and the family and thus welcomed women particularly in roles that werecompatible with being a mother and housewife – while recognizing that profes-sional careers for women were an economic and social necessity, particularlyafter the losses of the First World War had increased the majority of women inthe German population from over one million to over two million.13 This inter-pretation was probably most powerful at the grass-roots level of both parties,whereas most of their women activists shifted between the two positions.

In Weimar politics, the leading women of the DVP and DNVP merged theolder idea of spiritual motherhood with their claims to work for theVolksgemeinschaft. This mirrored a powerful concern of the German bourgeoisie

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Introduction


in 1918–19 that was soon ignored by the men in the bourgeois parties while thewomen and the youth groups tried to uphold it. Articulated most notably by thebourgeoisie in its response to the German Revolution of 1918–19, theVolksgemeinschaft idea implied hope for reconciliation between the classes,national unity, and harmonious cooperation between the groups involved inproduction – all the things that right-wing women believed they could achievebest. Privilege and party conflict should be overcome by a focus on the common(national) good. The Volksgemeinschaft appealed to the increasingly mysticalfeeling of national unity of August 1914, when Kaiser Wilhelm II claimed not toknow any parties any more and when German men of all classes marched unitedinto the trenches, while women hastened to organize a broad range of auxiliaryservices on the home front.14 After the defeat, Volksgemeinschaft was meant toovercome the harshness of domestic conflict. When the bourgeois partiesregrouped in November and December of 1918, they all appealed to theVolksgemeinschaft in their programs, and the DVP and DNVP did so even intheir party names (Volkspartei).15 Yet, while the women politicians in the DVPand DNVP continued to appeal to the Volksgemeinschaft and tried not to behaveas mere representatives of women’s interests, the fragmentation of middle-classeconomic interests and the related competition of special-interest groups toreGermany’s bourgeois parties apart. This prepared the ground for the proliferationof small-interest parties and, ultimately, the rise of the catchall National SocialistGerman Workers’ Party (NSDAP). The women of the DVP and DNVP thus heldup a vision that was increasingly discredited by the developments in their ownparties. In the end, that portion of the female electorate which they had success-fully mobilized (over a third by 1924) found little difficulty in transferring itsloyalties to the NSDAP, which, according to historian Peter Fritzsche, in the early1930s conveyed a more credible commitment to the Volksgemeinschaft than thebourgeois parties by appearing to be socially more inclusive and less bound tospecial interests.16

The stress on the Volksgemeinschaft, with the concomitant rejection ofinterest politics, helped the leading women of the DVP and DNVP to achievetheir mobilization goal. By casting the nation as an enlarged family in need ofwomen’s help and by representing the right to vote as a national duty, they over-came the reservations of many conservative women toward their new rights andprovided a justification for previously shunned political activity.17 This ensuredthat women provided the majority of votes for the DVP and DNVP. This was truealready in January 1919 and remained so in every major election of the WeimarRepublic. Although votes were never counted separately by sex in the entirecountry, those districts that did count them separately are diverse enough toconstitute a statistically meaningful sample.18 Whereas the DVP drew about 52to 55 percent of its votes from women, the share of women in the DNVP elec-

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torate (about 56 to 60 percent) was the second highest in the nation. Only thepredominantly Catholic Center Party together with its Bavarian sister, theBavarian People’s Party (Bayerische Volkspartei, BVP), had a slightly higherpercentage of women voters.19 Without this boost to conservative and religiouspositions provided by women’s participation in elections, the Weimar Republicwould have been significantly more left-leaning – for better or worse. Thisbecomes visible particularly in those fields in which conservative womenshowed strong interest: education, public morality, social politics, and the statusof the churches. As Cornelie Usborne has shown, the women of the DNVP and– to a lesser extent – the DVP often aligned with their colleagues from the CenterParty and BVP to leave a powerful conservative imprint on legislation in theseareas.20 A widespread explanation of Weimar women’s statistical preference forright-wing parties stresses that the conditions for women’s liberation (such asjobs making women independent of men) were not present in Weimar Germany.This argument implies, however, that women would have voted for the Left ifthese conditions had existed. Given the powerful ideological ties of conservativewomen to the right-wing parties (in terms of religion and nationalism, forexample), this seems highly unlikely. But conservative women would in that casehave forced the right-wing parties to take a more welcoming position towardwomen’s rights.21 As will be shown below, a commitment to the Volks-gemeinschaft did not rule out insistence on women’s rights.

By referring to the Volksgemeinschaft, the women activists of the DVP andDNVP were also able to gloss over tensions within their own ranks. The claimsof academic and professional women in both parties differed from those of urbanand rural housewives, whose interests also were not identical – with urban house-wives being consumers and rural housewives usually being both, producers andconsumers. The housewives, the largest and best organized women’s con-stituency of both parties, wanted above all to upgrade their economic situationand status and showed little interest in women’s professional rights. Womenteachers, however, saw their work as a lifelong vocation and therefore aimed tostrengthen women’s rights in the professions and ease the double burden of workand family. Yet, many women in the postal service were more interested in end-of-contract benefits than in professional rights because they hoped to quit whenthey got married. Many of these groups used the Volksgemeinschaft to masktheir own particular economic interests. Sometimes, groups with downrightcontradictory economic interests found themselves in the same party. In theDNVP, for example, urban housewives’ representatives clashed with representa-tives of domestic employees over social legislation for the employees, who in1925 still made up one-ninth of Germany’s female workforce.22 Right-wingwomen also disagreed on political issues such as participation in government andreparations agreements with the victors of the war. One finds nostalgic monar-

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Introduction


chists and conservative Christian women of the “old right” shoulder to shoulderwith women associated with the radical nationalist leagues of the “new right”.23

Sometimes these political fault lines followed the border between the DVP andDNVP, but often they did not. Yet, the Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric provided ascreen behind which many of these tensions could be mediated or hidden. It gavepolitical women an alibi to stay out of divisive disputes within their party.Women in the DNVP, for example, were largely able to circumvent the mostdisruptive inner-party conflicts with reference to their reconciling and idealisticmission for the Volksgemeinschaft – although their acquiescence often impliedtacit support for the dominant faction in the party.24

The Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric also contained some ambiguities, however.One of them had to do with the relation between national interest and partyinterest. In their appeals to the Volksgemeinschaft, right-wing women implied thatwomen, with their allegedly “natural” aversion to special-interest politics,observed a greater loyalty than men to party principles and national interest.Obviously, the professions of loyalty to party principles clashed with the women’sclaims to uniting the nation by overcoming party divisions. How might insistenceon the party program – rather than compromise across party lines, even at theexpense of the program – rally a nation shaken by defeat in the First World Warand internal turmoil? The women’s equation of their party’s principles withnational interest was therefore partisan and not conducive to creating aVolksgemeinschaft across party lines. A second ambiguity arose from the fact thattheir ideology forced the women politicians to fight for women’s interests whiledenying the legitimacy of interest politics. To allow women’s expected reconcilinginfluence to work, parties had to accord more parliamentary seats to women andstrengthen their position in the nation. If male party leaders refused to recognizethis, the women politicians would be forced to do exactly what they denounced:to fight for the special interests of women. Oddly, the representation of women’sinterests was thus consistent with the female politicians’ anti-interest rhetoric. TheVolksgemeinschaft concept could be used to advance women’s interests, but itcould also come to haunt the women politicians of the two parties.

Perhaps the most profound ambiguity of the Volksgemeinschaft idea resultedfrom a problem of definition. Who belonged to it, and who did not? This waslargely a question regarding the status of German Jews, most of whom wereassimilated and patriotic. The war and the trauma of defeat in 1918, however, hadfuelled German anti-Semitism, and many people on the Right excluded the Jewsfrom their vision of the Volksgemeinschaft and demanded that the civil rights ofGerman Jews be restricted. Whereas the DVP did not embrace this cause, theDNVP leadership welcomed anti-Semites while refusing to let anti-Semitismdominate its agenda. This led to the secession of the party’s most radical racistsin October 1922.25 Right-wing women were divided on this issue along similar

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lines as those of right-wing men. Some of them emphatically included GermanJews in the Volksgemeinschaft. The DVP politician Emma Ender, for example,claimed in 1920 that “it is completely unjustified to construct a contradictionbetween ‘German’ and ‘Jewish’.”26 Not all leading women in the DVP took sucha clear stand, but they did not promote anti-Semitism either. In the DNVP, thechair of the National Women’s Committee, Margarethe Behm, agreed withEnder. In a speech to the DNVP party convention of 1919, she praised the patri-otism of German Jews during the war and asked them to join her party, provokingangry heckling from some men.27 At the same time, however, KätheSchirmacher, a DNVP deputy in the National Assembly, wrote in her diary: “Theonly thing uniting us with Poland is our common hatred of Juda.” The propa-ganda leaflets published by the DNVP women’s committees, moreover,contained anti-Semitic messages, particularly in their attacks against theDemocratic Party, which was believed to be directed by Jews.28 When Anna vonGierke, one of the most active DNVP deputies in the National Assembly, wasdenied a promising place on the party ballot for 1920 presumably because hermother was Jewish, the leading DNVP women did nothing to defend her.29 At anational meeting of DNVP women in 1922, Johanna Richter, a deputy from thestate diet of Baden, claimed that Jewish influence on German culture representeda problem but asked that it be fought with spiritual methods and not with the anti-Semitic outbursts typical for the radical racists. Her talk met with widespreadapproval, even though in the discussion following it some women pointed outthat Jews had passionately supported the German cause in the contested borderareas with Poland.30 No notable DNVP women joined the racist secession in1922, but several of them became active in the DNVP’s National VölkischCommittee (Völkischer Reichsausschuss), which continued to stress anti-Semiticand racist arguments after the split.31 While most women’s activists in the DVPand some in the DNVP continued to see the Volksgemeinschaft as the nationalsolidarity of all Germans regardless of race, a growing number of women in theDNVP defined the Volksgemeinschaft in racial terms as the community of Aryanor Nordic people. This tendency became dominant among the DNVP womenduring the last years of the Weimar Republic.

It should be noted that the Volksgemeinschaft discourse of bourgeois women,which was shared by women from the moderate left all the way to the Nazis, hasinspired the thesis that the German bourgeois women’s movement as a wholedrifted consistently toward Nazi positions after giving up its left-leaning agendain 1908. In his pioneering work on the German bourgeois women’s movement1890–1933, Richard Evans advanced this thesis with respect to the largestumbrella organization of bourgeois women, the Federation of German Women’sAssociations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF). The surrender of the BDFto the Nazi regime and the ambivalent role of its former leader, Gertrud Bäumer,

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Introduction


in the Third Reich seemed to add credibility to this argument. Following Evans,other historians have accused the bourgeois women’s movement of preparing theground for Nazism, mostly through its adherence to a strict separation of genderroles and a motherly image of woman. But this argument has also drawn criti-cism.32 Undoubtedly, the BDF opened itself more to the right after 1918, partic-ularly under the influence of the recently founded housewives’ leagues, its largestmember organizations. But I have previously argued that party political differ-ences mattered for women’s stance and that the emphasis of the women’s move-ment on gender difference and motherhood mixed with a broad range of politicalprograms from the moderate left to the radical right. It left room for both oppo-sition to Nazism and support for it.33 Even women in the DVP and DNVP relateddifferently to the rapidly growing NSDAP from 1930 on, particularly to itsracism and anti-Semitism.

A comparative study of the DVP and DNVP reveals that both partiesappealed largely to the same constituency. Both recruited the bulk of theirsupporters from a predominantly bourgeois, nationalist, and Protestant milieu.The DVP, formed out of the National Liberal Party of the Wilhelmine Empire,rallied a variety of business groups, industrialists, housewives (mostly urban),civil servants, representatives of the Evangelical Church, and other sections ofthe middle classes.34 Its program included a commitment to monarchism butalso expressed the party’s willingness to participate in the Weimar system.35

Nevertheless, rejection of the democratic Weimar Constitution remained strongin the DVP, as was shown when it joined the DNVP in voting against theConstitution on 12 July 1919 and when high-ranking DVP members supportedplans for a coup d’état in October 1923.36 The DVP’s antidemocratic standsmattered less on the national (Reich) level, where the party entered numerousgovernment coalitions, than on the state level. In Prussia, by far the largestsingle state, the left-to-center “Weimar Coalition” of Social Democrats (SPD),Center Party, and Democratic Party ruled for most of the period 1919 to 1932,and the DVP constituted the right-wing opposition together with the DNVPuntil the victory of the Nazis in the state elections of April 1932. The DVP expe-rienced its strongest phase in 1920–22, when its vocal opposition role attractedmany disillusioned voters of the Democratic Party. In June 1920, the DVPreceived 14 percent of the national vote, up from 4.4 percent in January 1919.Yet, the DVP remained a party dominated by influential men (Honoratioren)and without effective grass-roots support. It never built a stable financial basethrough membership fees and instead remained dependent on contributionsparticularly from German big industry, which helped to alienate some of itsmiddle-class constituencies.37 The DVP therefore experienced losses at thepolls even while its leader Gustav Stresemann (Foreign Minister 1923–29) wonwidespread recognition for his moderate and pragmatic foreign policy. The

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decline of the party was accelerated dramatically after Stresemann’s death on 3October 1929.

The DNVP was formed out of the conservative, Christian-social, and anti-Semitic parties of the Wilhelmine Empire. Its program was reactionary, anti-republican, and monarchist. The DNVP rallied many factions on the rightincluding anti-Semites, monarchist officials and officers, large landowners, busi-nessmen, representatives of the Evangelical Church, housewives (rural andurban), as well as a section of the non-socialist workers’ movement.38 In its socialbase the DNVP thus resembled the DVP, except that it drew more support fromthe large landlords and rural workers east of the Elbe River, particularly inPomerania and East Prussia.39 The DNVP captured about 10 percent of the votein January 1919 but doubled its share until 1924 through its strict opposition tothe Weimar system and its advocacy of a confrontational foreign policy. Yet itshesitant and frustrating participation in government in 1925 and 1927–28 exposeda rift in the party between moderate pragmatists and radical anti-democrats thatresulted in the election of hard-liner Alfred Hugenberg as party chairman on 20 October 1928.40 In his efforts to transform the party into a battering ramagainst Weimar democracy, Hugenberg alienated the DNVP’s working-classconstituencies and pushed out the moderates.41 Although the DNVP experienceda less dramatic electoral decline than the DVP after 1929, it was still too weak tobecome more than a junior partner of the NSDAP after Hitler’s accession to poweron 30 January 1933.

Although the leading men of the DNVP and DVP had either opposed women’ssuffrage or supported it only at the very last moment, they did invite women torun for parliamentary seats in late 1918 and supported the buildup of a nation-wide structure of women’s committees headed by a National Women’sCommittee (Reichsfrauenausschuss, RFA) in each party. They encouragedwomen’s participation within areas that were deemed typical women’s issues,such as family and motherhood, education, religion, and women’s professions.42

Women were allowed to write those sections of the party program relating towomen’s and family issues, and the leading right-wing women found avenues toinscribe their views on the legislative process touching on these areas. Thewomen tried to broaden their sphere of influence particularly by addressingforeign policy, a traditional preserve of men. Occasionally they criticized theirrelegation to stereotypically “female” fields, and often they complained abouttoo little consideration for women candidates on the party ballots. Yet, thewomen of the DVP and DNVP in general conceded to work within the confinesset for them by their parties. This meant that their input on the major issuesdividing the party leadership was often marginal despite the fact that the chair ofthe RFA was also a member of the party’s leading committee. With their stresson the Volksgemeinschaft and women’s “innate” maternal abilities, they tended

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Introduction


to stay at the periphery of inner-party battlefields, trying to exert a reconcilingand uniting influence.

Like most men in their parties, almost all prominent women in the DVP andDNVP came from the bourgeoisie, often from the educated professional classes(the Bildungsbürgertum), while a few women came from the nobility. The predom-inant professional group were teachers, which was due to the fact that a school-teaching diploma was one of the few avenues in higher education open to Germanwomen before 1914. Most women in the teaching profession were unmarriedbecause a law abolished only in 1919 demanded the dismissal of married womenin the civil service, including teachers. Some women used their teacher’s diplomaas a springboard for a higher education once German universities began to opentheir doors to women (after 1900), and acquired doctorates. Many of the womenwho were not teachers identified themselves as housewives, but their extensiveactivities for their organizations meant that they spent little time in their ownhomes. Almost all of the notable women in the two parties were born between 1859and 1881. They therefore belonged to two generations of politicians identified byhistorian Detlev Peukert as the Wilhelmine generation (the age group of emperorWilhelm II, who was born in 1859) and the generation of the Gründerzeit (the firstdecade after the foundation of the German Empire in 1871). For the members ofthese generations the Wilhelmine Empire provided the formative experiences.Members of these age groups were predominant in the political and economic lifeof the Weimar Republic.43 Given that women were not allowed to join politicalorganizations until 1908, the differences between these two generations were lessimportant for women than for men. For women, the decisive rupture was therefore1908 or perhaps the outbreak of war in 1914. Altogether, the leading right-wingwomen displayed a broad range of personalities and interests that contrasts with therelative homogeneity of their social background, which they shared with mostwomen active in the BDF, the Democratic Party, and the Center Party.44 Thesewomen certainly did not fit the stereotype of the bespectacled, lifeless spinsters thatantifeminists liked to portray when they spoke about politically active women.45

One may wonder about the absence of younger women, given that members of thebourgeois women’s movement often complained about young women’s lack ofappreciation for the ideas and accomplishments of the prewar movement.46 But theage bracket of leading DNVP and DVP women was very similar to the age bracketof leading male politicians in the Weimar Republic – except for the extremistparties, whose leadership had a more youthful profile. Promising younger womenwere present in the women’s committees of the DVP and DNVP, but they had nochance of winning parliamentary seats once the electoral fortunes of their partiesbegan to decline in the second half of the 1920s.

Aside from the importance of anti-Semitism and racism among DNVPwomen, the worldview of the leading right-wing women was remarkably

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similar. Whether they focused on school reform, public morality, housewives’issues, sports, or foreign policy, the women of the DNVP and DVP alwaysassumed essential differences between the sexes, as expressed in the theory ofspiritual motherhood. A look at the most popular idols of women from the twoparties confirms this. The most celebrated woman was Auguste Viktoria, thewife of Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918). Auguste Viktoria was a weak polit-ical figure but dearly remembered as the patron of many women’s charity organ-izations.47 Her birthday (22 October 1858) and the anniversary of her death (11April 1921) were ritually commemorated in the DVP and DNVP women’s press– at both the national and local level. The articles and speeches produced forthese occasions were almost identical. Auguste Viktoria appeared as the passivesufferer, the compassionate mother of her children and “her” people, the self-sacrificing wife, the charitable and religious woman – in short: the incarnationof German women’s loyalty and selfless grandeur. Commemorating her birthdayand her death continuously offered right-wing women new opportunities tocontrast the supposedly lax morality of the present with her high-standingfigure.48 Festivities for Auguste Viktoria belonged to the standard activities ofwomen in the local party sections, so much so that the National Women’sCommittee of the DNVP in 1928 published a blueprint for these celebrations.49

Many women from both parties undertook pilgrimages to Auguste Viktoria’sgrave in Potsdam to lay wreaths, pray, and sing patriotic songs, and leadingwomen promoted her as the best possible role model for German youth and asthe ideal of German womanhood.50 Right-wing women also used AugusteViktoria’s enormous popularity among conservative women in their efforts toreconcile conservative women with their new political rights after 1918. ADNVP speaker in East Prussia, for example, argued that women’s suffrage wasa precious thing because it contained the three pearls fallen out of AugusteViktoria’s crown during the revolution: family, church, and fatherland.Previously, the empress had cared for them; now, it was the duty of all Germanwomen to protect them.51

Another widely revered woman was Queen Luise of Prussia (1776–1810),who had played a political role in the wake of Prussia’s defeat against NapoleonicFrance in 1806. Like Auguste Viktoria, she was the wife of a male ruler, not aruler in her own right. But Luise, whose birthday (10 March) was frequentlycommemorated by right-wing women, potentially represented a different ideal ofwomanhood. With an energy and courage that contrasted with the helplessnessof her husband and his ministers, Luise had tried to induce Napoleon I to grantmild peace conditions to Prussia. She had thus assumed an independent andactive role at a time when the leading men of her country were weak and thekingdom in disarray. To right-wing women of the Weimar Republic, Luiseappeared as a woman who had quietly rallied the defeated and demoralized

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Introduction


nation against the invader – although she did not live to see Prussia’s liberationin 1813.52 Käthe Schirmacher, a prominent DNVP activist, claimed that Luisewas not simply a loving wife and mother but a mother of the country and thepeople with “strong, combative mother love.”53 Another woman from the DNVPconsidered Luise the “soul” of Germany’s resistance against Napoleon and calledher the “genius of Prussia’s liberation.”54 Yet Luise’s self-assertive role was oftenwatered down by right-wing women. In the same breath with which they praisedLuise for inciting German resistance to Napoleon, they also described her as theperfect loving wife and mother, the graceful woman, and the generous queen.One DNVP woman, for example, stressed that Luise had achieved much whilepreserving her femininity – unlike the more imperious English queen ElizabethI and the Russian tsarina Catherine the Great. The author claimed that Germanwomen were never imperious – conveniently ignoring that Catherine the Greatwas of German origin.55

The DNVP and DVP women competed with their claims to Luise. The DVPwomen’s committees in the Berlin and Potsdam area, for example, regularly laidwreaths and flowers at Luise’s grave or her monument in Berlin’s Tiergarten(central park), while national DVP women’s politicians insisted that Luise wouldhave supported the DVP. They argued that Luise had promoted the Prussian prag-matic reformers over the reactionaries – the political ancestors of the DVP overthose of the DNVP – and conducted Realpolitik in Stresemann’s sense.56 TheDNVP also promoted a rich array of Queen Luise festivities and named Luise’sbirthday the “Day of the German Woman.” A women’s organization associatedwith the veterans’ league Stahlhelm and with ties to the DNVP called itself BundKönigin Luise.57 References to Luise were made by DNVP women in connectionto Weimar politics, as when Käthe Schirmacher claimed that Luise would neverhave signed the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Locarno.58 Luise was,according to historian Andrea Süchting-Hänger, part of an “invented tradition”(Hobsbawm) of right-wing women. Her image stressed national heroism incombination with motherly character.59

Another object of women’s admiration, though less ritually celebrated, was thefigure of the great male leader. Many women politicians from both partiesexpressed their longing for a powerful national leader, a male authoritariansavior. The DVP Reichstag deputy Katharina Kardorff-von Oheimb, for example,hoped that women’s reconciling mission might prepare the German people forthe acceptance of a charismatic man as the national savior, who would presum-ably complete the unifying work of women and free the Germans from the Treatyof Versailles.60 Other women in the DVP expressed similar feelings, as did manyDNVP women who made no secret of their dislike for the mechanics of parlia-mentary majorities. Although the women longing for a great man and nationalsavior often envisioned a new Bismarck or Frederick the Great, they also revered

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some male figures associated with Weimar politics. Women from both partiesvenerated Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, war hero and German president1925–1934, who received a majority of his votes from women in 1925 and at hisreelection in 1932.61 The leading women of the DVP expressed much admirationfor their party leader Gustav Stresemann that turned into worship after his death,and women in the DNVP adored Karl Helfferich, the party’s leading financialexpert who died in a train accident in April 1924. The DNVP women consideredGerman women particularly indebted to Helfferich because they saw him as theheroic conqueror of hyperinflation in 1923 and thus as the savior of many threat-ened German households. In 1928, DNVP women established a yearly Helfferichprize for the best article on a suggested topic. After 1928, women in the DNVPwere instrumental in fostering the cult of their new leader, Alfred Hugenberg, incompetition with the Hitler cult of the NSDAP.62

That activists in both parties endorsed such a passive and suffering role modelas Auguste Viktoria is revealing. Except for some charitable activities, she reallydid not do much, and all the aspects for which she was praised must have beenpoison to all claims to women’s rights. Luise, a much more energetic and colorfulpersonality, had emancipatory potential, but that aspect of her persona was sodomesticated that she often appeared merely as a more fortunate AugusteViktoria. It is plausible that the veneration of male leaders, together with theAuguste Viktoria cult, expressed a nostalgic monarchism prevalent among manyright-wing women.63 This monarchism is tangible enough, although DVP andDNVP women never made restoration of Wilhelm II to his throne a priority oftheir political work. Through his erratic personality and his flight to theNetherlands at the end of the war, the former Kaiser had discredited himself evenin the eyes of many monarchists – although they would never have criticized himopenly. Indeed, the Auguste Viktoria cult sometimes implied a muted critique ofWilhelm II in suggesting that the empress had suffered at his hands, too.64 In anycase, the longing for a great male leader shows that right-wing women, afterrallying the nation together, still expected men to lead.

Notes

1. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender & Nation (London: Sage, 1997), chapters 1 and5; Ute Planert, “Vater Staat und Mutter Germania: Zur Politisierung desweiblichen Geschlechts im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.” In idem, ed., Nation,Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in derModerne Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2000, pp. 17–19; UtePlanert, “Zwischen Partizipation und Restriktion: Frauenemanzipation undnationales Paradigma von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg.” InDieter Langewiesche and Georg Schmidt, eds., Föderative Nation.

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Introduction


Deutschlandkonzepte von der Reformation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg.Munich: Oldenburg, 2000; Dieter Langewiesche, “Nation, Nationalismus,Nationalstaat: Forschungsstand und Forschungsperspektiven.” NeuePolitische Literatur 40 (1995), pp. 216–17.

2. See Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Lifein World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill and London: University of NorthCarolina Press, 2000), and Ute Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegs-gesellschaft: Beruf, Familie und Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen:Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1989).

3. Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933 (Londonand Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976), pp. 228–30.

4. Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 16–32.

5. Emma Stropp, “Der neue Reichstag,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 26, 1July 1920; see also Stropp, “Friede und Frauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2,no. 3, 15 January 1920.

6. Raffael Scheck, “Women Against Versailles, Maternalism and Nationalismof Female Bourgeois Politicians in the Early Weimar Republic.” GermanStudies Review 22 (1999): pp. 22 and 33.

7. Doris Kaufmann, “Die Ehre des Vaterlandes und die Ehre der Frauen oderder Kampf an der äusseren und inneren Front: Der Deutsch-EvangelischeFrauenbund im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik.”Evangelische Theologie 46 (1986): 277–92. See also Scheck, “WomenAgainst Versailles,” pp. 21–2 and 30.

8. Peter Fritzsche, “Breakdown or Breakthrough? Conservatives and theNovember Revolution.” In Larry E. Jones and James Retallack, eds.,Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the History ofGerman Conservatism from 1789 to 1945. Providence and Oxford: Berg,1993; Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and PoliticalMobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press,1990); and Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth andMobilization in Germany, Studies in the Social and Cultural History ofModern Warfare 10 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000). On the use of the Volksgemeinschaft idea in the GermanPeople’s Party, see Stephen G. Fritz, “The Search for Volksgemeinschaft:Gustav Stresemann and the Baden DVP, 1926–1930.” German StudiesReview 7, no. 2 (1984): 249–80, which stresses Gustav Stresemann’s life-long commitment to the Volksgemeinschaft idea. See also Peter Lambert,“German Historians and Nazi Ideology: The Parameters of theVolksgemeinschaft and the Problem of Historical Legitimation,1930–1945.” European History Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1995): 555–82.

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9. Karen Offen claims that this view has been more prevalent in ContinentalEuropean than in American (and to some extent British?) feminism, whichfor a long time tended to stress gender equality and to downgrade theoriesof gender difference as conservative and anti-emancipatory: Karen Offen,“Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach.” Signs: Journalof Women in Culture and Society 14 (1988): 119–57 (particularly pp. 123–25and 135–37).

10. See, in particular, Christoph Sachße, Mütterlichkeit als Beruf: Sozial-arbeit, Sozialreform und Frauenbewegung 1871–1929, Edition Suhrkamp,Neue Folge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 115–16; Ann TaylorAllen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 2–13; Bärbel Clemens,Menschenrechte haben kein Geschlecht: Zum Politikverständnis der bürger-lichen Frauenbewegung, Frauen in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2(Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1988), pp. 79–101; UteFrevert, Frauen-Geschichte: Zwischen Bürgerlicher Verbesserung undNeuer Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 166. See alsoIrene Stoehr, “‘Organisierte Mütterlichkeit’: Zur Politik der deutschenFrauenbewegung um 1900.” In Karin Hausen, ed., Frauen suchen ihreGeschichte: Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Munich:C.H. Beck, 1983; and Irene Stoehr, Emanzipation zum Staat? DerAllgemeine Deutsche Frauenverein – Deutscher Staatsbürgerinnenverband(1893–1933), Forum Frauengeschichte 5 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1990).

11. Angelika Schaser, Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer: Eine politischeLebensgemeinschaft (Cologne, Vienna, Weimar: Boehlau Verlag, 2000), pp.81–3; see also Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, pp. 2–9.

12. Anny von Kulesza, “Sonderaufgaben der Frauen im neuen Reichstag,” NLC51, no. 65, 3 April 1924.

13. See the perceptive observations derived from a local study in Nancy Reagin,A German Women’s Movement: Class and Gender in Hanover, 1880–1933(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), chap-ters 8 and 11. On the demographic aspect of the crisis, see Atina Grossmann,Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and AbortionReform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 3–8.

14. See Verhey, The Spirit of 1914, pp. 1–11, on the importance of this myth.15. See Fritzsche, “Breakdown or Breakthrough?,” pp. 305 and 311, and

Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism, p. 23. For the youth movement, seeElizabeth Harvey, “Serving the Volk, Saving the Nation: Women in theYouth Movement and the Public Sphere in Weimar Germany.” In Larry E.Jones and James Retallack, eds., Elections, Mass Politics, and Social

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Introduction


Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992.

16. Peter Fritzsche, Germans Into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1998), pp. 209–10. See also Larry E. Jones, German Liberalism andthe Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill andLondon: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), and Thomas Childers,The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

17. See Scheck, “German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in theEarly Weimar Republic”, pp. 40–1.

18. Jürgen Falter, Hitlers Wähler (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990), pp. 139–40.19. Jürgen Falter, Thomas Lindenberger, and Siegfried Schumann, Wahlen und

Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik: Materialien zum Wahlverhalten1919–1933, Statische Arbeitsbücher zur neueren deutschen Geschichte(Munich: C.H. Beck, 1986), pp. 81–5. See also Gabriele Bremme, Die poli-tische Rolle der Frau in Deutschland: Eine Untersuchung über den Einflußder Frauen bei Wahlen und ihre Teilnahme in Partei und Parlament(Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1956), pp. 25–30, 70–1, 243, and 248,and Joachim Hofmann-Göttig, Emanzipation mit dem Stimmzettel: 70 JahreFrauenwahlrecht in Deutschland (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1986),pp. 28–35.

20. Usborne, Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany, p. 72.21. For an example of this argument, see Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz,

“Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work(Revised version).” In Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman and MarionKaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and NaziGermany. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984.

22. Ute Frevert, Women in German History (Oxford: Berg, 1989), p. 334.23. Geoff Eley, “Conservatives and Radical Nationalists in Germany: The

Production of Fascist Potentials, 1912–28.” In Martin Blinkhorn, ed.,Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment inTwentieth-Century Europe. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990.

24. See Raffael Scheck, “Women on the Weimar Right: The Role of FemalePoliticians in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP).” Journal ofContemporary History 36, no. 4 (2000), p. 551.

25. Werner Liebe, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei, 1918–1924, Beiträge zurGeschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien, 8(Düsseldorf: Droste, 1956), pp. 61–73; Lewis Hertzman, DNVP. Right-WingOpposition in the Weimar Republic, 1918–1924 (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1963), pp. 124–64. The most detailed work on the DNVPand anti-Semitism is Jan Striesow, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die

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Völkisch-Radikalen 1918–1922. 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Haag +Herchen Verlag, 1981).

26. Emma Ender, “‘Nationaler Frauenbund’ Eine Erwiderung von EmmaEnder, Hamburg,” Die Frau in der Politik. Monatsbeilage der “DeutschenStimmen,” 3, no. 2, 18 January 1920, pp. 16–18, in BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–42(DVP), vol. 5.

27. “DNVP-Parteitag, 12. und 13. Juli 1919,” Die Post 1919 (Sonderausgabe).See also Striesow, pp. 114, 121, and 128.

28. “Ostmark u. Auswärtige Politik,” Nachlass Schirmacher, Universitätsbiblio-thek Rostock, vol. 948/014. For examples of anti-Semitic propaganda, see “Andie deutschen Frauen,” in BA Koblenz, ZSG 1–44 (DNVP), Band 8 (Flug-blätter); “Wir Landfrauen” and “An die weiblichen Hausangestellten!”, in GStABerlin-Dahlem, XII Hauptabteilung, IV, Flugblätter und Plakate, vol. 187.

29. Indeed, they put the blame on her because she had allegedly refused to takea place on the ballot for the Prussian state diet offered to her by the partyleadership: “Zum Austritt der Abgeordneten Anna von Gierke,” Korres-pondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 3, no. 115, 29 May 1920;Scheck, “German Conservatism,” p. 51; and Striesow, p. 62.

30. “Tagung des erweiterten RFA,” Frauenkorrespondenz der Deutsch-nationalen Volkspartei (henceforth: Frauenkorrespondenz), vol. 3, no. 25,20 September 1922. Striesow, pp. 114, 121, and 128. For Behm’s speech, see“DNVP-Parteitag, 12. und 13. Juli 1919,” Die Post 1919 (Sonderausgabe).

31. Of the more prominent women, only the writer Pia-Sophie Rogge-Börnerjoined the secessionists, but she had not played an important role in theDNVP and became known only later on. See Hans Jürgen Arendt, SabineHering, and Leonie Wagner, eds., Nationalsozialistische Frauenpolitik vor1933. Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: dipa-Verlag, 1995), p. 342. Theadjective “völkisch” is impossible to translate into English. In the context ofDNVP activists, it usually implied a commitment to a racial and anti-Semitic definition of the Volksgemeinschaft, but it was sometimes used bypeople from other parties without a racist underpinning – as a mere adjec-tive to Volk (people).

32. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933, particularly pp.235–37, where Evans equates the Volksgemeinschaft with völkisch-racistthought, an equation that I think is too narrow given the broad appeal of thisconcept in the revolution of 1918–19, as shown in the works of PeterFritzsche; for an argument compatible with Evans’s thesis, see ClaudiaKoonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). See my summary of this debate inScheck, “Women against Versailles,” pp. 22–3. Critical of Evans’s thesis areAngelika Schaser, “Gertrud Bäumer – ‘eine der wildesten Demokratinnen’

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Introduction


oder verhinderte Nationalsozialistin?” In Kirsten Heinsohn, Barbara Vogeland Ulrike Weckel, eds., Zwischen Karierre und Verfolgung: Handlungs-räume von Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland. Frankfurt amMain, New York: Campus, 1997, and Schaser, Helene Lange und GertrudBäumer, pp. 314–36. For evidence that even SPD women used theVolksgemeinschaft rhetoric, see Heide-Marie Lauterer, “Republikanerinnendes Herzens? Sozialdemokratinnen und Nation 1914–1933.” In Ute Planert,ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismusin der Moderne. Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2000.

33. Scheck, “Women against Versailles,” pp. 22–3.34. Jones, German Liberalism, pp. 20–7; Arnold Ruge, “Deutsche Volkspartei

(DVP) 1918–1933.” In Dieter Fricke et al., eds., Lexikon zur Partei-engeschichte 1789–1945: Die bürgerlichen und kleinbürgerlichen Parteienund Verbände in Deutschland. Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut,1981–86, vol. 2, pp. 422–5; Wolfgang Hartenstein, Die Anfänge derDeutschen Volkspartei 1918–1920, Beiträge zur Geschichte desParlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien 22 (Düsseldorf: Droste,1962), pp. 19–28; Ludwig Richter, Die Deutsche Volkspartei 1918–1933(Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002), chapter 10. See also Detlef Lehnert and KlausMegerle, “Identitäts- und Konsensprobleme in einer fragmentiertenGesellschaft – Zur politischen Kultur der Weimarer Republik.” In DirkBerg-Schlosser and Jacob Schissler, eds., Politische Kultur in Deutschland.Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag,1987), and Karl Rohe, Wahlen und Wählertraditionen in Deutschland:Kulturelle Grundlagen deutscher Parteien und Parteiensysteme im 19. und20. Jahrhundert, Neue Historische Bibliothek (Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 1992). I should note that, for simplicity’s sake, I spellEvangelical Church with two capitals although I am aware that there wereonly provincial churches (Landeskirchen) but no unified national church.

35. Ruge, “Deutsche Volkspartei,” pp. 425–28; Hartenstein, Die Anfänge derDeutschen Volkspartei, pp. 106–20.

36. Günter Arns, “Die Krise des Weimarer Parlamentarismus im Frühherbst1923.” Der Staat 8 (1969): 181–216. See also Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei,pp. 88 and 92.

37. Jones, German Liberalism, pp. 47–54.38. Lewis Hertzman, “The Founding of the German National People’s Party

(DNVP), November 1918–January 1919.” Journal of Modern History 30(1958): 24–36.

39. An excellent study of DNVP politics in Pomerania is Shelley Baranowski,The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in WeimarPrussia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Amrei

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Stupperich, Volksgemeinschaft oder Arbeitersolidarität: Studien zur Arbeit-nehmerpolitik in der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918–1933 (Göttingenand Zurich: Musterschmidt Verlag, 1982), on the often overlooked right-wing workers.

40. Robert P. Grathwol, Stresemann and the DNVP: Reconciliation or Revengein German Foreign Policy (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980),which delineates carefully the conflicts regarding DNVP participation ingovernment and, in particular, its agonizing relationship to Stresemann’sforeign policy. See also Manfred Dörr, “Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei1925 bis 1928” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Marburg, 1964).

41. For this period, see Friedrich Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen, “DieDeutschnationale Volkspartei.” In Erich Matthias and Rudolf Morsey, eds.,Das Ende der Parteien 1933. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1960.

42. Scheck, “German Conservatism,” pp. 53–4.43. Detlev J. K. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Edition

Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 26–9. Older women in the entire bourgeois women’smovement in the 1920s often complained about the indifference of theyounger generation, which took for granted rights for which the older gener-ation had fought. See Irene Stoehr, “Neue Frau und alte Bewegung? ZumGenerationenkonflikt in der Frauenbewegung der Weimarer Republik.” InJutta Dalhoff, Uschi Frey, and Ingrid Schöll, eds., Frauenmacht in derGeschichte. Düsseldorf, Schwann, 1986.

44. Claudia Koonz, “Conflicting Allegiances: Political Ideology and WomenLegislators in Weimar Germany.” In Signs. Journal of Women in Culture andSociety 1, no. 1 (1976): 663–83 (here pp. 668–9).

45. For one of the most notorious examples, see the speech of the BavarianLandtag deputy Dr. Rudolf Herrman Buttmann (NSDAP), as quoted inArendt, Hering, and Wagner, eds., Nationalsozialistische Frauenpolitik vor1933, p. 152.

46. Stoehr, “Neue Frau und alte Bewegung?”47. See Andrea Süchting-Hänger, “‘Gleichgroße mut’ge Helferinnen’ in der

weiblichen Gegenwelt: Der Vaterländische Frauenverein und die Politisier-ung konservativer Frauen 1890–1914.” In Ute Planert, ed., Nation, Politikund Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne.Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2000, pp. 136–42.

48. See for example Annagrete Lehmann, “Zum 22. Oktober,” Deutsch-nationaler Volksfreund 5, no. 23, 28 October 1923.

49. RFA, “Kaiserin-Gedächtnisfeier,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 37, 13September 1928. See, for example, Der Parteifreund for many references tocommemorative celebrations of East Prussian DNVP women’s groups in1920–22 and beyond.

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Introduction


50. For two examples of many, see the appeal to lay wreaths in Berliner Stimmen8, October 1931, and the report about a celebration of the DNVP’s ProvincialWomen’s Committee of Hamburg: Die Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 16, 15November 1931. See also Clara Mende, “Auguste Viktoria zum Gedächtnis,”DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 14, 7 April 1922, and the report from the thirdparty conference in DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, nrs. 48/49, 9 December 1920.When Marie Bernays at this conference spoke of Auguste Viktoria as the lastGerman empress, hecklers contradicted her by calling “not the last one!”

51. “Kaiserin-Geburtstagsfeier in Cranz,” Der Parteifreund. Amtliches Blatt derdeutschnationalen Volkspartei, Landesverband Ostpreußen 1, no. 26, 4November 1920.

52. Annagrete Lehmann, “Was bedeutet uns deutschen Frauen der 10. März?”Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 13, 1 March 1924.

53. Käthe Schirmacher, “Zum 19. Juli, dem Todestag der Königin Luise,” DieDeutschnationale Frau 12, no. 28, 10 July 1930.

54. Annelise Spohr, “Königin Luise,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 14, 4 March1925, and Spohr, “Gekröntes Leid,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 9, 3 March1927.

55. A. Ritthaler, “Johanna von Puttkamer. Zu ihrem Todestag am 27.November,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 88, 20 November 1925.

56. “‘Unsere’ Stellung zu Locarno,” NLC 52, no. 232, 15 December 1925; M.S. [Martha Schwarz], “Königin Luise in ihrer Beziehung zur Gegenwart,”NLC 53, no. 43, 5 March 1926. For the celebrations in the Berlin-Potsdamarea, see Berliner Stimmen 2, no. 11, 14 March 1925.

57. Scheck, “German Conservatism,” pp. 51 and 54. More research hasconvinced me that I overemphasized the self-assertive and emancipatoryaspect of Luise’s historical persona for the DNVP women in this article. TheBund Königin Luise figures prominently in Süchting-Hänger, Das“Gewissen der Nation”.

58. “‘Unsere’ Stellung zu Locarno,” NLC 52, no. 232, 15 December 1925.Schirmacher was in the DNVP but the NLC was a DVP newspaper.Occasionally women from the DNVP and DVP published articles in theother party’s media.

59. Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation,” pp. 286–98. For the term“invented tradition,” see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., TheInvention of Tradition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983). Süchting-Hänger considers Luise the most important idol ofright-wing women. This may be true for the radical nationalist women’sleagues, but my reading of the women’s party press in both the DVP andDNVP leads me to conclude that Auguste Viktoria was even more presentthan Luise.

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60. See Katharina von Oheimb, “Was will der Nationalbund Deutscher Frauenund Mädchen?” and “Ziele und Aufgaben des Nationalbundes DeutscherFrauen,” both in ADEF, vol. O 12, and the materials in BAK, NachlassKardorff-von Oheimb, volumes 19a, 25, and 37. For von Oheimb’s generaloutlook, see her autobiography, Politik und Lebensbeichte.

61. Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik, p. 83.62. Clara Mende, “Deutschlands Hoffnung,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 52,

30 December 1920, and Mende, “1871–1921,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no.3, 20 January 1921; Elsa Matz, “Zum Tode unseres Führers Stresemann”and “Abschied von Stresemann,” both in NLC 56, no. 202, 9 October 1929.For the DNVP, see “Weimarer Brief II,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 7, 16February 1928, and Hannah Brandt, “Der Bismarck in uns!”Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 30, 26 July 1928; Annagrete Lehmann, “ZumTodestage Helfferichs,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 26, 15 April 1925; andLehmann, “Der Helfferich-Preis der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,”Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 30, 26 July 1928. For the Hugenberg cult ofDNVP women, see chapter 9.

63. Even DDP member Elly Heuß-Knapp, on an electoral campaign tour in late1918, saw it necessary to acknowledge the monarchism in her female audi-ence: Elly Heuß-Knapp, Die Deutsche Demokratische Partei und die Frauen(Berlin: Boll, 1918), pp. 5–6.

64. See Süchting-Hänger’s comments on Schirmacher’s monarchism, which didnot exclude criticisms of Wilhelm II (Das “Gewissen der Nation,” pp.147–8). Süchting-Hänger errs, however, when she claims that Schirmacherdecorated Wilhelm II’s bust in the Reichstag building in 1919. The bustunder consideration represented Wilhelm II’s grandfather, Wilhelm I, amuch less controversial Kaiser. See Walzer, p. 88. Some right-wing women(and men) found it hard to accept that Wilhelm II remarried quickly after thedeath of Auguste Viktoria: see Beda Prilipp, “Entweihtes Märtyrertum,” inDie deutsche Frau, 1922, no. 19, p. 26. I owe this reference to ChristianeStreubel.

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Introduction


–2–

Women’s Entry into Party Politics

We [the women] want to try to reconcile and mediate, as should be thenature of women, who are not meant to hate with others but to love withothers. Party strife has to cease whenever the big common interest ofGermany is on the line.

An anonymous DVP woman in DVP-Nachrichtenblatt, 15 January 1920.

Although women had received a formal – albeit extremely constrained – place inthe predecessor parties of the DVP and DNVP only shortly before the First WorldWar, they had been active within a wider spectrum of associations connected toright-wing politics for a long time. Charity organizations and the women’s sectionof the Red Cross (Vaterländischer Frauenverein) had already tied many middle-and upper-class women to the German dynasties and the nation in the course of thenineteenth century.1 Church-based organizations had also done much to mobilizeconservative Protestant women, above all the Evangelische Frauenhilfe and theGerman Evangelical Women’s League. The former was a large charity organizationfor women led by men, whereas the latter emphasized women’s participation in theChurch and advocated broader rights for women – though not the suffrage at thenational level. Nationalist leagues for women had also been founded before thewar. Although they were much smaller than the Vaterländischer Frauenverein orthe Evangelische Frauenhilfe, they helped to put foreign-policy issues such as thecolonies and the navy on the minds of conservative women.2 Yet, the introductionof women’s suffrage created a situation for which conservative women were poorlyprepared. Most of them had either opposed the suffrage or seen it as a desirablereform only in the distant future. Any discussion of suffrage reform before 1918inevitably brought up the demand to democratize Germany’s highly unequal statesuffrages, which supported the privileges of the very social groups to which manyconservative women belonged. After the introduction of the suffrage, however, theleading men and women of both parties encouraged a rapid mobilization of theirpotential female supporters because they feared a victory of the Social DemocraticParty (SPD) together with the more radical Independent Socialists (USPD) at theelection for the National Assembly.

The buildup of a women’s structure in the DNVP and DVP started in an impro-vised fashion during the campaign for the elections to the National Assembly, the

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first elections in which German women were allowed to vote. The circumstancesof the campaign were chaotic. The provisions of the peace treaty were stillunknown, and the reintegration of the returning soldiers posed enormous prob-lems. Socialist unrest rocked the cities and industrial regions, and a second, moreradical, revolution by the Independent Socialists or the Communists was threat-ening. While preparing for the elections, the parties of the right faced seriousorganizational challenges. They had done almost nothing to prepare conservativewomen for voting, and it was expected that, in addition to women’s suffrage, thelowering of the voting age from twenty-five to twenty would benefit the left. Thenew proportional voting system, moreover, canceled many advantages the oldmajority vote had given to their predecessors in the Wilhelmine Empire. Thenewly formed DVP and DNVP also had no time to build up a solid organizationand party statutes before the elections; rallying their supporters for the nationaland state elections in early 1919 took priority. Only after the elections to theprovisional Prussian state diet (Landtag) on 26 January 1919 did the DVP andDNVP begin to formally constitute themselves, a process that lasted well into1920. Because of its failed attempts to form a united liberal party with theDemocratic Party, the DVP got off to a later and more difficult start than theDNVP.3 As a consequence, the mobilization of women and the buildup of awomen’s organizational structure proceeded faster in the DNVP than in the DVP.

The accounts of DNVP members on the foundation of the party and its firstactivities directed toward women reveal a spirit of adventure, danger, and excitedimprovisation. Although some observers expected that a majority of Germanwomen would sympathize with religious or conservative parties rather than withthe socialists, the question was whether these women would vote in large enoughnumbers to prevent an absolute majority of the socialist parties, which conserva-tives saw as a fundamental threat to the capitalist order, the churches, and theintegrity of the nation. The SPD, as the only party having advocated women’ssuffrage for a long time, had begun to integrate the socialist women’s movementseveral years before the war.4 The newly formed Democratic Party had the eliteof Germany’s bourgeois women’s movement in its ranks, including GertrudBäumer, one of the leading personalities in the BDF, whereas the Center Partycould rely on a network of Catholic women’s groups to mobilize Catholic womenfor the elections.5 The DNVP’s founding manifesto, released on 24 November1918, stated, “The cooperation of the woman in public life is called for,” but theparty leaders were pessimistic about the possibility of mobilizing right-wingwomen in great numbers.6 Their spirits were lifted, however, by a woman withmuch experience in organizational life and a burning will to mobilize conserva-tive women: Margarethe Behm. Behm requested to be invited to a party boardmeeting, and the party leaders gave her a warm welcome and, according toBehm, immediately accepted the work of women as of “equal value.” Behm

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received the green light to constitute a National Women’s Committee(Reichsfrauenausschuss, RFA) for the DNVP and was offered a seat on theseven-member executive party board. The RFA of the DNVP got funds, anoffice, and some space in the official party newsletter where it could publish itsown news. On 6 December 1918 it held its first meeting.7

The DNVP leaders were lucky to have found Margarethe Behm. An approach-able and good-humored politician, she became the most popular woman from theDNVP. Her concern for socially disadvantaged women and her open-mindednesswon her admiration from people in different political camps. Born in 1860,Behm came from a wealthy land-holding family in Eastern Germany. She was anunmarried teacher who had gained a national reputation before 1918 as a skillfulorganizer and leader of the Gewerkverein der Heimarbeiterinnen (Union ofFemale Home Workers), a pressure group for pre-industrial cottage workers.These workers, predominantly women, were left out of the state insurance legis-lation that covered factory employees. With the vocal support of EmpressAuguste Viktoria, Behm lobbied the prewar Reichstag to pass a sickness-insurance bill for the home workers. Her interest in workers induced her to getinvolved in Adolf Stoecker’s Christian Social Party, one of the DNVP’s prede-cessors, which aimed at wooing Germany’s working class with a mixture ofsocial welfare, Christian values, and anti-Semitism – which she rejected after1918.8 Behm won great respect for her buildup of the RFA and her work in theelection campaign for the National Assembly. At the first national party conven-tion in July 1919, she was given the honor to report on the DNVP’s work in theNational Assembly right after the initial address by chairman Oskar Hergt. Behmpointed out the historic importance of that moment: “For the first time inGermany, possibly for the first time in the whole world, a woman stands up toreport on the work of a parliamentary group.”9

Behm enlisted dedicated helpers, above all Margot von Bonin, a wealthylandowner, Countess Emma von Westarp, the niece of Kuno von Westarp, theleader of the Conservative Party, and Margarethe Wolff, the secretary of Behm’sUnion of Female Home Workers. Together they designed pamphlets and skill-fully organized party propaganda toward women. Behm wrote to a myriad ofbourgeois women’s organizations and to Protestant ministers’ wives all acrossGermany to spread DNVP propaganda and enlist help at the local level. Havingonly a small number of trained female speakers at its disposition, the RFA reliedheavily on door-to-door propaganda by women who sympathized with it. Behmfurther initiated the foundation of Provincial Women’s Committees and localwomen’s committees in some areas. Whereas a nationwide net of these commit-tees materialized only slowly between 1918 and 1923, Behm’s pleas to women’sorganizations and the wives of ministers elicited a strong and immediateresponse from Protestant women, above all from the DEF and its umbrella organ-

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ization, the VEFD. The main messages of the RFA’s propaganda must haveresonated with these groups: by working and voting for the DNVP, women wouldhelp defend the church against the anticlerical policies of the socialists, protectfamily and marriage against disintegration, and ensure that Germany wouldadopt a proud and defiant posture toward its enemies.10 The chaotic events inearly Soviet Russia and the anticlerical policy of Prussia’s education minister,Independent Socialist Adolf Hoffmann, seemed to endow these messages withcredibility. Right-wing newspapers supported the propaganda of the RFA bypublishing summonses to women to vote and by giving practical suggestions onhow women could interrupt their work and vote even in remote places. Somenewspapers even suggested that landowners organize common trips to ballotoffices to ensure that all rural workers, particularly the women, would vote.11 Itwas essential to convince conservative women that they had to make use of theright to vote even if they had opposed it so far. The DNVP propaganda nevertired of stressing that, given the threat to Church and the family, voting was aduty, not a right, for the German woman.12 Altogether, the RFA of the DNVPunder Behm engineered an impressive propaganda campaign and soon becamethe envy of other parties.

The party’s guidelines for the elections, released on 27 December 1918,reflected the influence of Behm and her staff. Women now received a warmerwelcome than the founding manifesto had afforded them: “Through heradmirable wartime performance the German woman has gained a full right tocooperation in the shaping of our public life. We heartily welcome the woman,with equal rights, as a co-worker for the recovery of our people.” The guidelinesdefined the religious and moral education of the young as women’s primary taskbut also demanded protection for professional women.13 By justifying women’srights with their performance in social services during the war, the DNVPrejected the idea of the suffrage as a natural right of women. Behm must not haveobjected to this, since she sat on the executive party board that released thisproclamation, and party leaders tended to leave the formulation of clauses onwomen to the RFA.

The elections to the National Assembly appeared to reward the DNVPwomen’s efforts. Particularly encouraging were the estimates on women’s votingbehavior, generalized from a number of districts with separate voting. They indi-cated that the DNVP had received a majority of its votes from female voters,whereas the socialist parties had fared poorly among women.14 To the relief ofall bourgeois parties, the SPD and Independent Socialists together received only45.5 percent of the vote. Without women’s suffrage, Joachim Hofmann-Göttigargues, the socialist parties might have won an absolute majority tempting themto impose a socialist rather than democratic political system on Germany. Yet,even if these calculations are correct, a common policy of SPD and Independent

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Socialists was hardly a practical possibility any more after police under SPDorders had shot at workers associated with the Independent Socialists in theweeks preceding the elections.15 The disproportionate support of women for theDNVP (and, to a lesser extent, the DVP) set a pattern that was confirmed at everymajor election for the national parliament and the Prussian state diet. The surplusof women’s votes for the DVP and DNVP was highest in Protestant regions,whereas both parties tended to attract slightly fewer women than men in Catholicregions, where the Center Party or BVP were strong.16 Given that women’sparticipation in elections was – except for January 1919 – significantly lowerthan men’s, the share of the DVP and DNVP in the general women’s vote musthave been considerably higher than their share in the general male vote. Thisprovoked much irony in the right-wing press, because the party most instru-mental in introducing women’s suffrage, the SPD, fared poorly among women,whereas the parties least supportive of women’s suffrage, such as the DNVP,benefited most from it. It was also noted that the Democratic Party did notreceive a significant surplus of female votes, although it liked to call itself the“Party of Women” because the most famous representatives of the BDF,including Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, supported it. With glee, the right-wing Deutsche Tageszeitung wrote in 1924: “The electoral statistics illuminatedthe family life of the left-wing parties in a rather funny way. The members of themajority SPD and even more the Communists had to realize with anguish that alarge number of their wives had committed ‘political adultery’ and cuckoldedthem most wonderfully.”17 The newspaper ignored, however, that the massivesurplus of women in the German population made it impossible to ascribe withcertainty the strong women’s vote for the right-wing parties to the wives of left-wing men.

The elections of 1919 brought three DNVP women into the NationalAssembly: Margarethe Behm herself, Anna von Gierke, and Käthe Schirmacher.Von Gierke (1874–1943) was perhaps the most outspoken DNVP woman in theNational Assembly. She was well known as director of a model youth institutionin Charlottenburg, a town incorporated into Greater Berlin in 1920.18 In theNational Assembly, she fought for the recognition of housekeeping as a profes-sion and addressed an impressive range of social policy questions. The DNVPlost a versatile and eloquent politician when she left the party in response to itsanti-Semitism in 1920 (her mother was from a Jewish family that had convertedto Protestantism).19 Käthe Schirmacher (1865–1930) was an unusual figure inDNVP politics. Coming from a wealthy merchant family from the east Germanport city Danzig (today Gdansk, Poland), she had studied French literature at theSorbonne in Paris and later at the University of Zurich, where she received herdoctorate in 1895. Schirmacher had played a prominent role in the left-wingwomen’s movement before 1914, serving for many years as secretary of the

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International Council of Women, and she maintained a lesbian relationship withKlara Schleker, who was a DNVP deputy in the state diet of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1919–20.20 After 1900, Schirmacher had begun to embrace an increas-ingly fanatical and racist German nationalism even while maintaining hercommitment to women’s rights. At the same time, she expressed hatred ofdemocracy, whose weakness and decadence she claimed to have observed inFrance. Schirmacher’s move to the right isolated her in the women’s movement,so that she had resigned, or been urged to resign, from all of her positions ininternational and German women’s organizations by 1914.21 During the war, shecalled for a compulsory women’s service that would drill young women in the artof housework, gardening, and childcare and instill strict discipline and nationalistvalues in them.22 When her home town was threatened by Poland at the end ofthe war, Schirmacher rallied Danzig’s German majority behind a posture ofnational defense and joined the DNVP. Her energetic work won her instant admi-ration, and she was elected as a representative of West Prussia to the NationalAssembly in 1919. In the National Assembly, Schirmacher spoke mostly onforeign policy issues.23 Her stay in the national parliament was cut short becauseshe did not receive a place on the party ballot for the Reichstag elections in June1920. Her electoral district (Danzig-West Prussia) had ceased to exist because ofGermany’s territorial losses in the Treaty of Versailles, and the party leadershipdid not offer her a promising spot elsewhere. Her feminist past may have influ-enced this decision.24 Schirmacher remained active, however, in the RFA andother party committees until her death in 1930. In the elections to the provisionalPrussian Landtag on 26 January 1919, only one DNVP woman was elected:Elisabeth Spohr. Spohr was a teacher who addressed a broad range of topics inparliament, ranging from education to the status of midwives. She remained inthe Prussian Landtag without interruption until its replacement by an all-maleNazi body in the spring of 1933.25

After these elections the DNVP developed statutes that refined the structureand purpose of the RFA. Its chair automatically received a seat in the executiveboard of the party.26 According to the 1925 budget, the administrative leader(Geschäftsführerin) of the RFA got a yearly salary of 3816 marks, a substantialsalary. Also salaried were an archivist (1920 marks), a secretary (Schreibkraft;1320 marks), and an auxiliary secretary (912 marks). For its administrative needsthe RFA could draw on 1200 marks per year.27 The RFA also included ten totwenty members who were paid from a different budget or performed voluntaryservice. The RFA chair was probably paid as a member of the party’s executiveboard, whereas some RFA members were parliamentarians and thus had an inde-pendent income as long as they retained their seats. Other RFA members werepaid by related organizations to which they belonged (for example the Union ofFemale Home Workers). After a while, the RFA constituted a larger committee

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with less executive power, the “Enlarged National Women’s Committee”(Erweiterter RFA), to which it invited representatives of the provincial women’scommittees. To expedite policy decisions, the RFA also formed a smaller execu-tive committee of eight members.28 A proclamation of the RFA from January1919 named twenty-three members, but the size of the RFA varied in thefollowing years.29 The RFA occupied a room in the party headquarters in Berlin.The members of its executive committee were in almost daily contact wheneverthe Reichstag or the Prussian Landtag were in session. Usually the RFA organ-ized a national women’s meeting preceding the annual national party conference,and a leading RFA member spoke on the status of women’s work in the partyduring the national party conference.30

According to its statutes, the primary tasks of the RFA were to organize prop-aganda among women and to advise the party leadership in all mattersconcerning women and children.31 The RFA was also to act as a coordinator ofsimilar activities by regional and local women’s committees, whose buildup ithad to encourage and supervise. Thus every DNVP organization in a Prussianprovince or non-Prussian state should receive a Provincial Women’s Committee(Landesfrauenausschuss, LFA), every district a Kreisfrauenausschuss, and everytown or village an Ortsfrauenausschuss. By analogy to the RFA, these regionaland local women’s committees were funded by the corresponding party organi-zation, to which they were accountable. The chair of the women’s committeealways had a seat and a vote on the board of the corresponding party organiza-tion. But the women’s committees also were responsible for keeping in touchwith the women’s committees on other levels and, in particular, with the RFA.32

They were expected to subscribe to the newsletter of the women in the party,which the RFA began to publish in September 1919 as Frauenkorrespondenz derDNVP, after 1925 as Frauenkorrespondenz für Nationale Zeitungen, and fromApril 1931 on as Die Deutschnationale Frau. Thus all women’s committees inthe DNVP were integrated into two different structures, a horizontal party struc-ture including the men, and a vertical structure of women’s committees from thelocal level up to the RFA. The primary allegiance of the local and regionalwomen’s committees was not to the RFA but to the corresponding party organi-zation, which was usually dominated by men. The party statutes of 1920 statedthat LFA members were to be elected by the general party organization in thearea, the Landesverband. The same applied to women’s committees on the locallevel. The chair of the RFA was appointed by the party’s executive board, but theRFA co-opted its members and was not responsible to the party at large for itsselections.33

This structure treated the women like an economic or professional interestgroup in the party. The workers, for example, also had their national committee(with a slightly smaller budget than the RFA), their local committees, and their

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newsletter.34 From the start, DNVP women doubted that this structure wasadequate for the representation of women’s interests. Women, for one thing, wereeconomically and professionally about as diverse as men. As RFA member andReichstag deputy (1920–1932) Paula Mueller-Otfried stated, a female factoryworker would not likely consider herself represented by a female academic inparliament.35 It made little sense subsuming these groups under one women’sstructure while men received a say in all the other committees organizedaccording to economic and professional interests. The DNVP leadership didmake some concessions to this concern by stating that women should belong toall party institutions “in adequate numbers” and by granting women representa-tion in the DNVP Professions Committee, which had subcommittees for nurses,midwives, housewives, female domestic servants, and other professions domi-nated by women. Incidentally, the first chair of the subcommittee for housewiveswas party chairman Oskar Hergt!36 Yet “adequate numbers” was an elusiveformulation, and the problem remained that the few women with seats in parlia-ments could hardly cater to the diversity of women’s professional groups. Awoman writing to the DNVP program committee thus argued that, if indeedseparate structures were to be founded (which she did not consider a good solu-tion), the party should be consistent and set up women’s structures fully parallelto men’s.37 This proposal aimed at building gender equality into the party ratherthan making the women’s committees an appendix of a party that as a whole wasstill dominated by men. Some local women’s committees that had formed spon-taneously at the first hour even tried to resist their inclusion in the local partyorganization. The very dynamic Dresden women’s committee, for example,protested that the local DNVP section was too passive and that the women’scommittee would do better work if it remained independent.38

Other party members, however, argued against separate structures altogetherand suggested that, given the dismal state of Germany overall, the emphasisshould be on gender cooperation rather than on separate organization, which tothem suggested rivalry. Women in the Berlin-Steglitz section of the DNVPrefused to form a women’s committee because they had worked so well togetherwith the men that they saw no need for dividing duties and for meeting sepa-rately.39 When the DNVP section of the Potsdam district held its yearly confer-ence in 1922, the LFA Potsdam declined to hold the customary women’s meetingbefore the conference. Although the LFA admitted that there were importantissues to be discussed by women, it declared its preference for concentrating onthe essential questions of the German people and for making a statement on theunity of men and women in the party.40 Although these women felt that theirconcerns would be taken seriously in the party even without women’s commit-tees, anti-feminism was also a motivation for rejecting a separate women’s struc-ture. Major Olberg, one of the people involved in the drafting of the party

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statutes, suggested that women’s committees should be called recruiting commit-tees (Werbeausschüsse) and that they should do no more than devise propagandastrategies for women and train female speakers. The women’s committees thuswould belong to the party’s general propaganda division and not be tempted toact as a vehicle for women’s interests.41 Although Olberg’s ideas were notadopted by the party board, the circumstances of the elections to the NationalAssembly reveal that the RFA of the DNVP came into being primarily as a prop-aganda office charged with mobilizing as many conservative women as quicklyas possible. Early party documents typically align the RFA with the DNVP’sPress Committee and thus reveal that the party leaders considered propagandatoward women as the main purpose of the RFA.42

That the women’s committee structure prevailed had to do with the fact that italready existed in many places and had done good work during the electioncampaigns in January 1919. Behm, who continued to cooperate closely with themale party leaders, considered the women’s committees a good solution for thetime being. Given that women had not voted before and were new party members,committees devising propaganda specifically for women and coordinating activi-ties with those of sympathetic women’s organizations made sense. A memo-randum on party structures from early 1919 recognized the success of thewomen’s committees in spite of resistance (supposedly from men), but stressedthat regional and local women’s committees that still worked independentlyshould be tied to the regular party organization.43 The leading women, for theirpart, tried to invalidate the objections of the men. Margot von Bonin, the vice-chair of the RFA, suggested at a party meeting in early February 1919 that womenshould not, in principle, be organized in separate groups, but that the formation ofwomen’s committees was necessary primarily for propaganda reasons. The RFAeven encouraged the women’s committees to invite men to their meetings.44

After the elections of January 1919, the RFA focused on the buildup ofwomen’s committees at all levels. The party newsletters steadily reported thefoundation of new women’s committees, a process that was interrupted by theinflation in 1923 but resumed in 1924, albeit at a slower pace. A clear picture isdifficult to convey because women’s committees in many places faltered with thedeath or moving away of the chair and had to be founded again later on. Manywomen’s committees may only have existed on paper, and sometimes menheaded the local or regional women’s committee. Wolfgang Kapp, for example,was listed as chair of the East Prussian women’s committee in early 1919 beforebecoming a putschist a year later – a unique career for the chair of a women’scommittee!45 Specific information exists on the Prussian province Pomerania,one of the regions where the DNVP was strongest. In Pomerania, 233 women’scommittees existed in September 1920, and in August 1921 the number hadalmost doubled (430). This extraordinary success was ascribed to Hannah

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Brandt, the chair of the Pomeranian LFA. Brandt later put her organizationaltalent at the disposal of the RFA in Berlin.46 In Bavaria, where the DNVP (calledthe Bayerische Mittelpartei, BMP) was weak, the buildup of women’s commit-tees proceeded much more slowly, so that Lenore Kühn, the editor of the DNVPwomen’s newsletter and member of the RFA, decided to visit the state in late1919 to identify the problems and to encourage progress. The situation wasdepressing. Some women’s committees had been formed, but many had becomedormant and were presided over by men after the leading women had withdrawn.In some places, the wives of male party leaders tried to build up a women’scommittee, but the problem was that most women in the Bavarian DNVP wereeither not interested in becoming active or considered themselves unfit for polit-ical work. They called for speakers and organizers from Berlin.47 The RFA never-theless drew an optimistic picture in August 1922 after having gathered data onthe women’s organization in all parts of Germany. Thirty-eight ProvincialWomen’s Committees (LFAs) had been constituted, covering the entire country.A total of 1,900 women’s committees existed at all levels, but, as the examplesof Pomerania and Bavaria show, the distribution was very uneven. In addition,the DNVP had 2,748 Vertrauensfrauen (women of confidence) carrying outsome of the tasks of a local women’s committee where none existed. There wasa tendency for the women’s committee structure to be best developed in thoseareas where the party itself was strongest. Annagrete Lehmann (1877–1954),Behm’s successor as chair of the RFA since February 1923, used this correlationlater to claim that women’s work benefited the party, since the DNVP wasstrongest where women were most active. But she could not prove that she didnot invert causality.48

The RFA of the DNVP took its propaganda and education mission very seri-ously. It built up a file containing the addresses of sympathetic women’s organi-zations and women, distributed blueprint speeches to members of provincial andlocal women’s committees, lent out folders with materials on specific politicaltopics, and organized conferences and meetings for women in the party.49 TheRFA further organized political education courses, which enlisted the elite of theparty (men and women) as speakers and focused on political organization skillsas well as nationalist ideology.50 Until August 1922, eleven provincial women’scommittees had offered training workshops with practical exercises on speechand the running of political assemblies.51 In September 1919 the RFA beganpublishing the Frauenkorrespondenz, while continuing to print most of itscontents in the official party newsletter. The Frauenkorrespondenz was sent towomen’s committees, individual subscribers, and to newspapers, which wereencouraged to print its articles. As editor of the Frauenkorrespondenz, the RFAenlisted the highly able Lenore Kühn. Born in 1878 in Riga to a Baltic Germanfamily, Kühn had a PhD in philosophy from the University of Freiburg (1907)

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and was a freelance author and journalist. She was an excellent pianist andacquired some expertise in archeology and physics.52 Kühn was the key figurein the DNVP women’s publications in the early Weimar years. In 1921 she beganpublishing an intellectually more demanding DNVP women’s periodical until theinflation forced her to give it up in 1923.53 Her scandalous private life, however,reduced her standing in the DNVP and may have influenced her decision to stepdown as editor of the Frauenkorrespondenz in December 1923, making room forElisabeth Spohr. A highly attractive woman even in her mature years, Kühn hadmany male admirers and a colorful private life: divorced from her first husbandin 1919, she married the painter Hermann Frobenius in 1922 but soon started apassionate and painful liaison with an Italian nobleman, which led to her seconddivorce in 1926.54

The inflation in 1923 hampered the activities of the women’s committees byexacerbating the already bad financial situation of the party. The Frauen-korrespondenz had to make frequent pleas for rapid payment of the subscriptionfees because currency depreciation made delayed payments worthless. Trainsbecame so expensive that many women could not afford to travel to meetings inother towns, and the Frauenkorrespondenz had to substitute the cheap blueprinttechnique for the black-and-white newspaper print in early 1923. Whereas theFrauenkorrespondenz had appeared biweekly in 1921 and 1922 (twenty-sixtimes per year), the RFA had difficulties delivering it more than once a month in1923. Only in the spring of 1924 did regular publication resume, and in 1925 theFrauenkorrespondenz intensified the frequency of publication to twice a week(ninety-eight issues per year).55

The DVP adopted the DNVP model for the organization of women with onlyminor modifications. The National Women’s Committee (RFA) of the DVPconstituted itself in the first weeks after the foundation of the party under theleadership of Clara Mende. Mende was the key woman in the early Weimar yearsthat Behm was in the DNVP. Born in Erfurt (Thuringia) in 1869, she became ateacher and was promoted to the rank of Oberlehrerin before she got married andconsequently had to leave her teaching job. While working as a housewife,Mende fostered contacts to the National Liberal Party and the women’s move-ment. Before the war, she was a co-founder of the German League for Women’sSuffrage (Verein für Frauenstimmrecht) and became the chair of the women’scommittee formed by the National Liberal Party after the liberalization of theLaw of Associations in 1908. This role and her frequent contributions to the partypress established her as an important presence in the party during the First WorldWar. When the National Liberal Party reconstituted itself as the DVP, Mendesigned the new party’s first proclamation and became its second vice-chair inApril 1919.56 She was the only female DVP representative in the NationalAssembly (1919–1920) and sat in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1928. Mende, who

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travelled through the entire country during election campaigns, had a reputationas an excellent speaker and debater.57 She was the mastermind behind the estab-lishment of the DVP’s committee structure for women and acted as chair of theRFA until 1924.58

The women’s propaganda of the DVP for the elections of January 1919stressed the same themes the DNVP addressed but presented them in a morerational and less polemical tone.59 The RFA of the DVP received room for itscommunications in the party’s newsletter DVP-Nachrichtenblatt and in the dailynewspaper Nationalliberale Correspondenz, but it never published its newsindependently, as the DNVP women did. Such a step was discussed in 1920 butrejected because of financial constraints.60 The chair of the RFA in the DVP waselected by the party’s Executive Committee (Geschäftsführender Ausschuss). Inthe fall of 1920 the RFA gave itself statutes that broadened membership in theRFA approximately along the lines of the Erweiterter RFA in the DNVP: allfemale DVP parliamentarians and all female DVP members on the NationalEconomic Council became members. Every electoral district was entitled toname a woman as deputy to the RFA, which could offer membership to leadersof influential women’s organizations willing to cooperate with the DVP. The RFAalso decided to invite a well-known male party member to join it. It chose thechairman of the DVP’s Hessian section, Dr. Eduard Dingeldey, because of hisopenness to women’s issues; Dingeldey, however, was overwhelmed by his otherduties and often asked to let himself be replaced by Dr. Paul Moldenhauer,member of the DVP group in the National Assembly. Since the RFA after itsenlargement became too unwieldy, it elected a smaller Executive Committeefrom its own ranks – as did the RFA of the DNVP.61 The provincial sections ofthe DVP were organized according to electoral districts, not provinces or federalstates as in the DNVP, and their women’s committees thus were calledWahlkreisfrauenausschüsse (Electoral District Women’s Committees, WkFA).This did not always make a difference, since some states and provinces wereidentical with electoral districts. The statutes of the DVP women’s committeesput more emphasis on the political training of women than the DNVP’s, but thecontext suggests that political training was meant primarily to enhance women’spropaganda skills.62

This was not true, however, for the political training courses of Katharina vonOheimb, one of the DVP’s representatives in the Reichstag (1920–1924). VonOheimb was an unusual figure among the DVP women. She was independentlywealthy, married four times, the mother of six children, a passionate hunter, andacquainted with leading military and political figures of the Weimar period.Divorced from her first and third husbands, she had inherited a fortune from herdeceased second husband. In 1927 she married Siegfried von Kardorff, a DVPReichstag representative who had left the DNVP in protest against its anti-

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Semitic tendencies.63 From the start of the Weimar Republic, Kardorff-vonOheimb saw it as her mission to educate women for their role in politics byoffering and financing educational workshops for women politicians at her homein Goslar (south of Braunschweig). She invited nationally known speakers fromvarious bourgeois parties, men and women, to lectures for her workshops. Tocombat partisan spirit, the course participants were forbidden to use the namesof the German parties throughout the workshop.64 Kardorff-von Oheimb thushelped train a crowd of women politicians from the DVP and other predomi-nantly bourgeois parties.

After the Reichstag elections of June 1920, in which the DVP tripled its shareof the vote, DVP women intensified their efforts to build up a nationwidewomen’s structure. Mende and other well-known DVP women undertook manytrips across Germany to encourage the foundation of local women’s committees– with some success.65 In Silesia, where Mende had frequently spoken, thenumber of women’s committees tripled between the summer of 1920 andFebruary 1921. Even if one should be suspicious of the RFA’s tendency to reporttoo optimistically (it failed to give absolute numbers for Silesia), the evidencesuggests that the women’s structure began to become denser.66 Yet, the DVPalways lagged behind the DNVP: In October 1920 the RFA of the DVP was stillencouraging the formation of women’s committees in many electoral districts,which shows that this had not yet happened consistently at a time when theDNVP was already done with it.67 At the end of 1922 the RFA sent out ques-tionnaires to gauge the status of women’s work in the provinces. The resultshowed that the DVP had 500 women’s committees altogether (compared to theDNVP’s 1,900 in August 1922); a women’s committee (WkFA) now existed inall but three of Germany’s thirty-five electoral districts.68 As in the DNVP,however, the women’s structure was very uneven. Whereas the women’scommittee of Schleswig-Holstein boasted 400 women’s committees at the end of1921 (a number that seems exaggerated in the light of the RFA’s total of 500), theprovince of East Prussia had reported only fifteen about a year earlier.69

Problems similar to those experienced by the DNVP were common. Few womenoutside the big cities agreed to do political work, and fewer yet had the qualifi-cation to do so. In April 1922 Martha Schwarz, the secretary of the DVP’s RFA,wrote that politically untrained women had done much damage by sending outconfusing messages on the DVP’s stands. There were not enough experiencedwomen politicians to train women at the local level, and a shortage of fundsstifled much local initiative (the DVP was haunted by the same financial prob-lems as the DNVP). In 1923, the inflation further obstructed women’s work inthe DVP.70 Even the most successful women’s committee of the DVP, the one inSchleswig-Holstein, had to overcome strong resistance from women themselvesto getting involved. Otherwise its recruitment appeals to women would not have

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repeated many times over that the women’s committees were not separate polit-ical organizations but worked for the benefit of the party as a whole. The womenleaders of Schleswig-Holstein even encouraged women to invite men to theircommittees, since that would ease cooperation within the party. Given that manywomen were novices to political life, the leading women asked women to followthe lead of men in shared committees while learning to speak and think inde-pendently in their own committees.71 In spite of these problems, women joinedthe DVP in great numbers from the start; at the second party meeting in October1919 it transpired that one third of party members were women, and in the springof 1920 the RFA claimed that women formed the majority of DVP members(later, however, party sources again spoke of one-third).72

A picture of the structures of women’s work within the parties would beincomplete without consideration of organizations that cooperated with thewomen’s committees of the DNVP or DVP, and often both. All German bour-geois parties had more or less formal alliances with political or economic interestorganizations, and many people from these organizations were also partymembers, while their leaders received seats in the party’s parliamentary groupsand committees. A variety of organizations had such ties to the women’s commit-tees of the DVP and DNVP. From the start, the German Evangelical Women’sLeague (DEF) was one such organization, although its ties to the DNVP werestronger than those to the DVP. When the chair of the Evangelical League, PaulaMueller-Otfried, joined the DNVP, she created some controversy in her organi-zation, which had pledged neutrality in party politics. But the secularization poli-cies of the Prussian government in 1918–19 allowed the conservative DNVP toappear as the stronger bulwark of the Evangelical Church than the liberal DVP.Cecilie Brickenstein, a member of the Evangelical League’s national board, wasalso a DNVP activist in Bremen, and Asta Rötger, Mueller-Otfried’s deputy inBerlin, was a DNVP expert on urban women and DNVP representative in theBerlin city parliament.73 The Evangelical League’s most important contributionto the DNVP was likely its chairperson. A grim and serious figure, Mueller-Otfried became the longest-serving and most active Reichstag member amongthe DNVP women (1920–32). Born in 1865 to the family of a high-ranking civilservant, Mueller-Otfried became a teacher. She lived in Hanover for most of herlife and remained unmarried. As chair of the DEF since 1901, she had – likeBehm – a national reputation before joining the DNVP. She was also active in theConservative Party, the most important predecessor of the DNVP, and played aleading role in the women’s committee founded by this party in 1913. To build aconservative counterweight to the BDF, the umbrella organization of Germanbourgeois women’s leagues, Mueller-Otfried helped to found a new umbrellaorganization of Evangelical women’s leagues, the Vereinigung EvangelischerFrauenverbände Deutschlands (VEFD, Union of Evangelical Women’s Leagues

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of Germany). With twenty-seven associated leagues numbering nearly twomillion members, the VEFD was the largest women’s organization of the WeimarRepublic.74 Its chair, Magdalene von Tiling (1877–1974), represented the DNVPin the Prussian Landtag (1921–30) and the Reichstag (1930–33). She was ateacher who became well known through her pedagogical and theological writ-ings and received an honorary degree in theology.75

Although the DVP did not attract the leaders of the Evangelical women’smovement, it counted among its ranks an important woman politician who occu-pied various posts in the hierarchy of the Evangelical Church: Elsa Matz(1881–1959). Matz became Mende’s successor as chair of the RFA in 1924 andsat in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933, with a short interruption in 1924. Bornin the Pomeranian capital Stettin (today: Szczecin, Poland), she studied Germanphilology, philosophy, and history at the universities of Kiel and Berlin and grad-uated with a PhD. Matz started her career as a teacher in Stettin, where sheachieved the prestigious rank of Oberstudiendirektorin. She became active in theprofessional organization of women teachers of Pomerania, and in 1929 she wasappointed director of a high school for girls in Berlin-Charlottenburg, a wealthysection of town.76 Matz, who was involved in the DVP from the very beginningand had a seat on the DVP’s Party Board (Parteivorstand) for most of the Weimaryears, was the most energetic and active Reichstag representative among theDVP women. She addressed almost every topic from Church and educationissues to sports and the international traffic of women.

Other organizations with ties to both parties were nationalist leagues such asthe Navy League of German Women, the Women’s League of the GermanColonial Society, the German Women’s League (Deutscher Frauenbund), and thewomen’s branch of the League for Germans Abroad (Verein für das Deutschtumim Ausland). Women from both parties were represented in the leadership ofthese organizations and attended their conferences. Some nationalist leagueswere even founded by women from the two parties during the Weimar Republic,such as the German Women’s Committee against the War-Guilt Lie (DeutscherFrauenausschuss zur Bekämpfung der Schuldlüge, DFBS). Clara Mende wasinvolved, and the DNVP, which reported almost every meeting of this organiza-tion, was represented by Annagrete Lehmann, deputy in the Prussian Landtag1921–28 and Behm’s successor as chair of the RFA. Some women from theCenter Party and the Democratic Party participated half-heartedly; the BDFinitially became a member but soon left the organization, which it consideredhyper-nationalistic.77 Another league supported by the National Women’sCommittees of both parties was the German Young Women’s Service (DeutscherJungmädchendienst), a nationalist and conservative group that set up workcamps for young women in which it emphasized service, obedience, and self-sacrificing nationalism. Both parties also had ties to the BDF, but those of the

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DVP were stronger, as indicated by the role of Emma Ender, who represented theDVP in the diet of Hamburg (1919–24) and was chair of the BDF from 1924 to1931.78 Although the DNVP sent representatives to the BDF, it was initially verycritical of it and considered it a puppet of the Democratic Party.79 This criticismsoftened as the BDF moved to the right and gave the DVP and conservativeorganizations more say, but it never disappeared. Both parties, moreover, hadstrong ties to the housewives’ leagues, a conservative force in the BDF until theyleft it in 1932.80

Altogether, the women’s committee structure, as it was adopted by the DNVPand DVP, represented a compromise. Women were organized separately but withstrong ties to their corresponding party organization, to which they were prima-rily responsible and upon which they depended financially. The parties’ interestswere well served by offering women special committees charged with attracting anew voter group and with communicating its interests to the party at large. Anyattempt to create parallel women’s and men’s committees on all levels, however,would have encountered resistance from most men and many women in bothparties, not to speak of the difficulties arising from the lack of politically trainedwomen and the state of party finances. The women’s committee structure easedcommunication between the national women’s leaders and grass-roots women,and it gave women a separate space in which they were able to discuss their ideasindependently. By the same token, it also helped to limit women’s influence andto consign their political activities to specific sectors. In 1928, the women’sactivist and BDF member Agnes Zahn-von Harnack observed that women haddifficulties making a career in the parties because they were too closely tied to thewomen’s committee structure, whose influence was narrowly circumscribed. Tomen, in contrast, a broad range of committees was open.81 It certainly was aninjustice to treat the majority of voters for both parties as one single interest groupon a par with specific male or mixed groups, such as farmers and artisans, indus-trialists, and blue-collar workers. Yet, the women themselves rarely objected totheir consignment to specific sectors and were afraid that in mixed committeesthey would soon leave initiative and leadership to men, whereas their owncommittees might better prepare them for a political role. Even when they tried tobuild up a power position within the parties, they usually claimed rights only inthe realms they considered as women’s spheres and did not demand that womenshould have a say in all matters. A motion DVP women submitted to the firstnational party conference, for example, demanded that the party leadershipsupport women’s rights and women’s committees and request a memorandumfrom the RFA on all issues of concern to women. But the DVP women did notobject when no vote on the motion took place and when Stresemann, as partychairman, suggested that the motion be made into a mere recommendation for theparty board. This decision then received unanimous approval.82

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The women’s committee structure in the DNVP and DVP was more elabo-rate than in the other non-socialist parties. The Center Party developed some-thing similar to the RFA only in 1922 (Reichsfrauenbeirat). Earlier, theCatholic Women’s League of Germany (Katholischer deutscher Frauenbund,KDF) had taken over important aspects of women’s work on all levels of theparty; Hedwig Dransfeld, its chair, had a seat in the Reichstag and on the partyboard.83 In the Democratic Party, women created their own RFA as early as theDNVP and DVP but built up a much weaker structure of provincial and localwomen’s committees and relied more on Vertrauensfrauen and random grass-roots activity. It is unclear whether this was by choice or necessity, but it isplausible that the Democratic Party’s dramatic losses after the elections to theNational Assembly dried up the resources for a more ambitious women’s struc-ture before it had really gotten under way.84 Many women’s committees in theDemocratic Party, unlike those in the DVP and DNVP, financed themselves. Areport on the south German women’s activities of the Democratic Party fromNovember 1919 stresses that only the Bavarian women’s groups of that partyreceived funding from the local party organization.85 Their relative independ-ence may have given the women’s committees of the Democratic Party morelatitude in pressing for women’s demands. In general, the women from theDemocratic Party put more emphasis on women’s rights than their sisters onthe right did. DDP member Regine Deutsch, for example, demanded that theDemocratic Party’s program allow women to be admitted to all party commit-tees in proportion to their share of membership and wanted to commit her partyto fighting the vagueness of the passage on equal rights of men and women inthe Weimar Constitution, which granted equality only “in principle.”86 Otherwomen from the Democratic Party stressed that the suffrage was neither a giftnor an imposed obligation but simply a natural right, an argument rarely heardin DVP and DNVP circles.87

Notes

1. Jean H. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the NationalImagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 2001); Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation”,chapter 2; Süchting-Hänger, “‘Gleichgroße mut’ge Helferinnen’ in derweiblichen Gegenwelt: Der Vaterländische Frauenverein und diePolitisierung konservativer Frauen 1890–1914.” In Ute Planert, ed., Nation,Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in derModerne. (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2000).

2. Roger Chickering, “‘Casting Their Gaze More Broadly’: Women’s PatrioticActivism in Imperial Germany.” Past and Present 118 (1988): 156–85; Lora

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Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1844–1945. (Durham, NC andLondon: Duke University Press, 2001). Ilka Riemann, “‘Er mit der Waffe,sie mit Herz und Hand’: Die Rolle der Frauenvereine in der Sozialpolitik,insbesondere der Vaterländischen Frauenvereine.” In Jutta Dalhoff, UschiFrey, and Ingrid Schöll, eds., Frauenmacht in der Geschichte (Düsseldorf:Schwann, 1986).

3. Larry E. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar PartySystem, 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North CarolinaPress, 1988), pp. 17–22; Werner Liebe, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei1918–1924 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1956), pp. 7–50; Dennis Paul Walker, “TheGerman Nationalist People’s Party: The Conservative Dilemma in theWeimar Republic.” Journal of Contemporary History 14 (1979): 627–47;Lewis Hertzman, “The Founding of the German National People’s Party(DVNP), November 1918–January 1919.” Journal of Modern History 30(1958): 24–36, and Hertzman, DNVP: Right-Wing Opposition in the WeimarRepublic, 1918–1924 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963),chapter 3.

4. Jean H. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy,1885–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 142–6 and184–5; Renate Pore, A Conflict of Interest: Women in German SocialDemocracy, 1919–1933, Contributions in Women’s Studies (Westport:Greenwood Press, 1981), p. 20; Werner Thönnessen, The Emancipation ofWomen: The Rise and Decline of the Women’s Movement in German SocialDemocracy 1863–1933. Trans. Joris de Bres (London: Pluto, 1973).

5. For the Catholic women’s movement, see Gisela Breuer, Frauenbewegungim Katholizismus: Der Katholische Frauenbund 1903–1918 (Frankfurt andNew York: Campus, 1998), and Birgit Sack, Zwischen religiöser Bindungund moderner Gesellschaft: Katholische Frauenbewegung und politischeKultur in der Weimarer Republik (1918/19–1933) (Münster: Waxmann,1998); and Sack, “Katholizismus und Nation: Der katholische Frauenbund.”In Ute Planert, ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen undNationalismus in der Moderne. Frankfurt (Main): Campus, 2000.

6. “Aufruf der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in Liebe, DeutschnationaleVolkspartei, pp. 107–8.

7. Margarethe Behm, “Wie kam es doch!” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 49, 6December 1928. For a detailed description of the RFA’s constitution andfirst activities, see Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation”, pp.134–49.

8. Emma von Westarp, “Margarethe Behms Lebensgang,” and Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Margarethe Behm im Parlament,” both in: Frauenkorrespondenz11, no. 32, 8 August 1929. On Behm’s rejection of anti-Semitism, see Jan

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Striesow, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die Völkisch-Radikalen1918–1922. 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Haag & Herchen, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 114, 121,and 128.

9. “Parteitag 1919,” special issue of Die Post, July 1919, p. 2.10. Margarethe Behm, “Wie kam es doch!”; Scheck, “German Conservatism

and Female Political Activitism in the Early Weimar Republic,” pp. 41–4;Liebe, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, p. 36. For a summary and critique ofthe DNVP’s propaganda in the early Weimar Republic, see Sneeringer,Winning Women’s Votes, pp. 42–51.

11. See, for example “Die deutsche Frau in der neuen Staatsordnung,” DeutscheTageszeitung 26, no. 3, 2 January 1919, and the November and December1918 issues of the Neue Preußische Zeitung (Kreuz-Zeitung), particularlynos. 582, 607–8, 610, 637.

12. Scheck, “German Conservatism,” pp. 43–4, and, for propaganda materials,BA Koblenz, ZSG 1–44 (DNVP), particularly vols. 8 and 11, as well asGStA Berlin, XII, IV, vols 176–78.

13. “Aufruf des Vorstandes der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in Liebe,Deutschnationale Volkspartei, pp. 109–12.

14. Scheck, “German Conservatism,” p. 44. Joachim Hofmann-Göttig,Emanzipation mit dem Stimmzettel: 70 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht inDeutschland (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1986), pp. 28–9. See alsoAnnagrete Lehmann, “Ziel und Entwicklung der deutschnationalenFrauenarbeit.” In Max Weiß, ed., Der nationale Wille. (Essen: WilhelmKamp, 1928), p. 321; Max Weiß, “Organisation.” In idem, ed., DerNationale Wille, p. 371.

15. Hofmann-Göttig, Emanzipation mit dem Stimmzettel, pp. 28–9.16. Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 81–5.

See also Gabriele Bremme, Die politische Rolle der Frau in Deutschland(Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1956), pp. 25–30, 70–1, 243, and248, and Hofmann-Göttig, Emanzipation mit dem Stimmzettel, pp. 28–35.

17. “Die gehörnten Linksparteien,” Deutsche Tageszeitung, 16 April 1924, inBA Berlin, Reichslandbund Pressearchiv, 7988, p. 3.

18. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 215–28; Marie Baum,Anna von Gierke: Ein Lebensbild (Weinheim and Berlin: Julius Betz, 1954).

19. Hildegard Goetting, Deutschnationale Vertretung der Fraueninteressen inder Deutschen Verfassunggebenden Nationalversammlung. Deutsch-nationale Flugschrift, 91. Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle,1921, pp. 4–9 and 11; GStA Berlin, XII, IV, vol. 173. Von Gierke later madea futile attempt to start a women’s party in Berlin; in 1930 she ran for theReichstag on the ballot of the Conservative People’s Party (Konservative

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Volkspartei), a group of former DNVP members alienated by Hugenberg,but she was not elected.

20. Walzer, Käthe Schirmacher, pp. 26 and 79; Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women:The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997), p. 96. See also Johanna Gehmacher, “Der andereOrt der Welt. Käthe Schirmachers Auto/Biographie der Nation.” In SophiaKemlein, ed., Geschlecht und Nationalismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa1848–1918. (Osnabrück: fibre, 2000), pp. 99–112.

21. Walzer, Käthe Schirmacher, pp. 66–8.22. Käthe Schirmacher, Frauendienstpflicht. Bonn: Marcus & Weber, 1918,

p. 6.23. See below, Chapter 7.24. See Raffael Scheck, “Women in the Non-Nazi Right,” in Paola Bacchetta

and Margaret Power, eds., Right-Wing Women Across the Globe (London andNew York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 146–8.

25. Spohr, by the way, also lost her electoral district of 1919 (Posen), but theparty leadership offered her a good alternative. She was not burdened by afeminist past. See “Deutschnationale Frauenversammlung,” Der Partei-freund. Amtliches Blatt der deutschnationalen Volkspartei, LandesverbandOstpreußen 3, no. 35, 28 September 1922.

26. The statutes do not say how the chair of the RFA was determined, but whenBehm stepped down in early 1923, her successor, Annagrete Lehmann, wasappointed by the party’s executive board. See Lehmann, “Ziel undEntwicklung der deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” p. 329.

27. “Haushaltsplan für das Jahr 1925,” in Niedersächsisches StaatsarchivOsnabrück, Erw. C. 1, DNVP, no. 17, vol. 2, pp. 17–18.

28. Lehmann, “Ziel und Entwicklung deutschnationaler Frauenarbeit,” pp.320–3; Liebe, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, p. 36.

29. “Ihr deutschen Frauen in Stadt und Land!” in Wahl-Zeitung des Deutsch-nationalen Volksvereins Greifswald 1, 8 January 1919 [printed 1918].

30. In the SPD, the male party leadership had forbidden the women to meetbefore the general party conference because they feared that women wouldthus have an opportunity to formulate demands that they could present to thegeneral party conference. See Pore, A Conflict of Interest, pp. xvi and 59.

31. “Satzung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde,DNVP, vol. 1, pp. 31–6; “Frauenfragen,” in Max Weiß, ed. PolitischesHandwörterbuch (Führer-ABC). Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriften-vertriebsstelle, 1928, p. 209. Liebe, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, (p. 36)uses slightly different names for the committees that were maybe used bythe DNVP activists whom he interviewed in the 1950s. My informationfollows the contemporary documents.

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32. “Satzung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde,DNVP, vol. 1, pp. 31–6; Liebe, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, pp. 124–5. Forthe structure of the DNVP, see Liebe, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, pp. 34–9.

33. “Satzung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in Liebe, DeutschnationaleVolkspartei, pp. 124–5.

34. “Haushaltsplan für das Jahr 1925,” in Niedersächsisches StaatsarchivOsnabrück, Erw. C. 1, DNVP, no. 17, vol. 2, pp. 17–18.

35. Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Frauenlisten oder Mitarbeit in der Partei,”Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 22, 10 July 1920.

36. This may be explained by the argument, widespread among DNVP womenin this period, that housewives and mothers should ideally stay at home. ForHergt’s chairmanship in the subcommittee, see Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no.6, 4 December 1920. See also “Satzung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,”in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 1, p. 32.

37. Frau C. Rentsch, “Entwurf zur Organisation einer Partei,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 1, pp. 160–1.

38. BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 485, p. 93.39. Meißner to Behm, 14 March 1919, BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 486,

pp. 25–6.40. Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 12, 4 March 1922.41. Major Olberg, “Zur Frage der Organisation der Deutschnationalen

Volkspartei,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 1, pp. 144–5.42. See the documents quoted in Weiß, “Organisation,” p. 367.43. “Die Aufgaben der Partei,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 1, pp.

183–93.44. “Bericht über den Verbandsvertretertag in Berlin, 7./8. Februar 1919,” in BA

Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 1, pp. 199–200; “Tagung des erweitertenR.F.A. der Dn. Vp.,” Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 4,no. 284, 3 December 1921.

45. See list of the Landesverband Ostpreußen, in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde,DNVP, vol. 1, p. 104. Kapp had built up the Fatherland Party in 1917–18,and this party helped mobilize many nationalist women. See HeinzHagenlücke, Deutsche Vaterlandspartei: Die nationale Rechte am Ende desKaiserreiches (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1997), pp. 184–5.

46. Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no. 1, 18 September 1920; Frauenkorrespondenz 2,no. 23, 20 August 1921.

47. “Bericht über den Stand der Frauenausschüsse der deutschnationalenVolksvereine (Ortsgruppen der bayr. Mittelpartei),” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 26, pp. 163–71.

48. Annagrete Lehmann, “Aus der Arbeit unserer Landesfrauenausschüsse,”Die Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 8, 15 July 1931.

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49. Lehmann, “Ziel und Entwicklung der Deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” pp.322–3.

50. See, for example, the report on one such course in Frauenkorrespondenz 2,no. 2, 2 October 1920.

51. “Deutschnat. Frauenarbeit im Lande,” Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 23, 23August 1922.

52. BA Koblenz, Nachlass Kühn, vol. 72 (Autobiographische Lebensläufe undWerke) and vol. 77 (Lebenslauf in Jahrzehnten). See also the extensive biog-raphical information in Christiane Streubel and Gregor Pickro, eds.,Nachlass Lenore Kühn (1878–1955). Findbuch des Bundesarchivs Koblenz.Koblenz, 2002, pp. XI-LXII.

53. Elisabeth Spohr, “An unsere Leserinnen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 13, no. 13,26 March 1931. The newsletter founded by Lenore Kühn in 1921 was calledDie Deutschnationale Frau and should not be confused with the officialDNVP women’s periodical published under the same name from 1931 to1933.

54. BA Koblenz, Nachlass Kühn, vol. 8 (diary 1921–22), entries of 10 June1921 and 22 June 1921. See also vol. 72 (Autobiographische Lebensläufeund Werke) and vol. 77 (Lebenslauf in Jahrzehnten).

55. For the difficulties during the inflation of 1923, see for example Lehmann,“Ziel und Entwicklung der Deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” pp. 328–9.

56. Eberhard Kolb and Ludwig Richter, Nationalliberalismus in der WeimarerRepublik: Die Führungsgremien der Deutschen Volkspartei, 1918–1933(Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1999, vol. 1), p. 36.

57. See the notes on her trips in DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 20, 20 May 1920.58. M.S. [Martha Schwarz], “Tagung des Reichsfrauenausschusses,” NLC 51,

no. 113, 10 July 1924.59. “Was will die Deutsche Volkspartei?” in GStA Berlin-Dahlem, XII, IV, vol.

157 (DVP, 1919 Erstaufrufe u. a.). See also vol. 158 (DVP, 1919, Wahl zurNationalversammlung am 19. January 1919). For a more detailed discussionof DVP women’s propaganda, see Sneeringer, pp. 30–4.

60. “Sitzung des RFA,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 16, 22 April 1920.61. Clara Mende, “Zusammensetzung der Aufgaben des Reichsfrauen-

ausschusses,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 44, 4 November 1920. See alsothe lists of RFA members in DVP-Nachrichtenblatt vol. 2, no. 1, 2 January1920 and no. 18, 6 May 1920. At this time the RFA had twenty members.

62. For examples see Elisabeth Cimbal, “Die Frauenorganisation der DeutschenVolkspartei in Schleswig-Holstein,” Mitteilungen Deutsche VolksparteiSchleswig-Holstein 1, no. 12, 15 August 1920; “Aus der praktischenVereinsarbeit. Frauenausschüsse,” Mitteilungen Deutsche VolksparteiSchleswig-Holstein 2, no. 12, 7 July 1920; and “Aus der praktischen

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Vereinsarbeit: Tätigkeit der Frauenausschüsse,” Mitteilungen DeutscheVolkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 2, no. 13, 21 July 1920. See also Kolb andRichter, eds., Nationalliberale Politik in der Weimarer Republik, p. 388(meeting of the DVP Executive Board of 19 October 1920); Emma Ender,“Anregungen für die Arbeit der Frauenausschüsse,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt1, no. 9, 27 November 1919; “Arbeitsprogramm für die Frauenausschüsse,”DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 42, 21 October 1920.

63. Kardorff-von Oheimb, Politik und Lebensbeichte (Tübingen: Hopfer, 1965),pp. 74–80 and 94–5.

64. BA Koblenz, Nachlass Katharina Kardorff-von Oheimb (N 1039), vols. 25and 37.

65. See, for example, DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 45, 11 November 1920.66. DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 5, 3 February 1921.67. “Aus den Frauenausschüssen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 3, 15 January

1920.68. “Volksparteiliche Frauenarbeit 1922,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 5, 2

March 1923.69. “Aus dem Geschäftsbericht der Gesamtpartei,” Mitteilungen Deutsche

Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 24, 23 December 1921; “Gründungdes Wahlkreisfrauenausschusses der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußens,”Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußen 2, no. 9, 15 December1920.

70. Martha Schwarz, “Organisationsarbeit der Frauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt3, no. 14, 7 April 1922; “Finanzfragen der Frauenausschüsse,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 2, 19 January 1923.

71. “Aus der praktischen Vereinsarbeit: Frauenausschüsse,” MitteilungenDeutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 2, no. 12, 7 July 1920; “Aus derpraktischen Parteiarbeit. Tätigkeit der Frauenausschüsse,” MitteilungenDeutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 2, no. 13, 21 July 1920; and “DieFrauenorganisation der Deutschen Volkspartei in Schleswig-Holstein,”Mitteilungen Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 1, no. 12, 15 August1920.

72. Clara Mende, “Frauenarbeit in der Partei,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 2, 8January 1920; “Bericht über den Zweiten Parteitag der DeutschenVolkspartei am 18., 19. u. 20. Oktober 1919,” p. 59; “Das Wort der Frauwährend der Wahlvorbereitung” [by Emma Stropp], DVP-Nachrichtenblatt2, no. 9, May 1920.

73. On Brickenstein, see Hannelore Cyrus et al., eds., Bremer Frauen von A bisZ – Ein biographisches Lexikon (Bremen: Verlag in der Sonnenstrasse,1991); on Rötger, see “Eine deutsche und evangelische Frau,” Die Deutsch-nationale Frau 14, no. 22, 15 November 1932.

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74. On the DEF and VEFD, see foremost Ursula Baumann, “Religion undEmanzipation: Konfessionelle Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1900–1933.” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 21 (1992): 171–206;Baumann, Protestantismus und Frauenemanzipation in Deutschland(Frankfurt, New York: Campus, 1992); and Doris Kaufmann, “Die Begründ-ung und Politik einer evangelischen Frauenbewegung in der WeimarerRepublik.” In Jutta Dalhoff, Uschi Frey, and Ingrid Schöll, eds., Frauen-macht in der Geschichte. Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1986. See also Schneider-Ludorff, Magdalene von Tiling, p. 39.

75. For a short biography, see Schneider-Ludorff, Magdalene von Tiling, pp.25–45.

76. “Zum 50. Geburtstag von Dr. Else [sic] Matz,” NLC 57, no. 90, 5 May 1931.For Elsa Matz’s church connections, see Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, DieFrauenbewegung. Geschichte, Probleme, Ziele (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1928), p. 351.

77. See Archiv des KDF, folder “Auslandskommission 1920–1928, 1–122–2;”Klaus Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine in der Weimarer Republik1919–1933 (Egelsbach, Frankfurt, Washington: Hänsel-Hohenhausen,1995), pp. 132–3.

78. Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, pp. 33–4 and 38.79. See L.R.K. [Lenore Ripke-Kühn], “Die Tagung des Bundes Deutscher

Frauenvereine in Hamburg,” Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 3, 4 October 1919.80. On the relationship between the housewives’ leagues and the BDF, see

Hiltraud Schmidt-Waldherr, Emanzipation durch Professionalisierung?Politische Strategien und Konflikte innerhalb der bürgerlichen Frauen-bewegung während der Weimarer Republik und die Reaktion des bürger-lichen Antifeminismus und des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: MaterialisVerlag, 1987), pp. 104–6, and Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine inder Weimarer Republik, pp. 131–42.

81. Zahn-Harnack, Die Frauenbewegung, p. 322; Scheck, “GermanConservatism,” p. 45.

82. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 13. April1919. Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1919, pp. 47–8, 66–7, and 103–4.

83. Rudolf Morsey, Die Deutsche Zentrumspartei, 1917–1923 (Düsseldorf:Droste, 1966), pp. 140 and 292; Birgit Sack, “Katholizismus und Nation,”p. 294: Helen Boak, “Women in Weimar Politics.” European HistoryQuarterly 20, no. 3 (1990): 369–99, particularly p. 383, where 1921 is givenas the date when the Center Party’s RFA was formed (I took 1922 fromsources closer to the events); Emmy Wingerath, “Die Tagung desReichsfrauenbeirats der Deutschen Zentrumspartei,” and “Satzungen desFrauenbeirats der Deutschen Zentrumspartei,” both in Mitteilungen des

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Reichsfrauenbeirats der Deutschen Zentrumspartei, 1927, no. 8, Mai-August 1927, pp. 14–16.

84. For the context, see Jones, German Liberalism, pp. 59–60.85. Catharina von Meyer, “Süddeutsche Frauentagungen,” Das Demokratische

Deutschland, 1918/1919, no. 50, 23 November 1919, pp. 1155–9, in GstABerlin-Dahlem, XII, III, vol. 10.

86. Regine Deutsch, “Die Frau als Staatsbürgerin,” Das DemokratischeDeutschland, 1918/1919, no. 17, 5 April 1919, pp. 399–402, in GStA Berlin,XII, III, vol. 9. The formulation in the constitutional paragraph was criti-cized for leaving room for discrimination. See Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Diebürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1894–1933, Kritische Studienzur Geschichtswissenschaft 46 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1981),pp. 168–9.

87. W. Krobiell, “Frauen und deutsche Demokraten,” Das DemokratischeDeutschland, 1918/19, no. 36, 17 August 1919, pp. 839–40, in GstA Berlin-Dahlem, XII, III, vol. 10.

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–3–

Hostility to Women in Politics

Ladies and gentlemen, women understand that it is not easy for man toaccept that we now stand next to him in political life (aha!). It is difficult. Ibelieve the sympathetic men to be in a minority. (Laughter and applause.)… Men have not yet had an opportunity to learn that our influence in publiclife is necessary.

Else Lange in a speech at the DVP’s first party conference, April 19191

It comes as no surprise that politically active women encountered hostility anddiscrimination from men in the DNVP and DVP. The welcome messages of theparties toward women in 1918 could not obscure the anti-feminism or defensiveattitude of most men from both parties. Rejection of women’s political engage-ment sometimes also came from women who did not approve of the suffrage andquestioned the legitimacy of women’s representation in parliaments. But whereverthey came from, open attacks on the women’s political role were one thing; theoften daily observation of political women that men were uncomfortable workingwith them and doubted their competence was another. These doubts were oftenshared by the women politicians themselves: they were newcomers to parliamen-tary life, and only a few of them had been involved in party work before 1918.Their involvement in women’s organizations had prepared many of them for nego-tiating with men, speaking in public, and working connections to their benefit. Yetparty life, particularly in parliaments, was different. Most of the leading maleparliamentarians were experienced and claimed to know how parliamentary workshould be done; they often made it difficult for women to articulate and introducetheir own ideas.2 Women, however, sought ways to strengthen their self-confi-dence and to get better acquainted with political matters, hence the emphasis ofwomen in both parties on the political education of women in speech and debateworkshops and their sometimes exaggerated clinging to topics where their quali-fications were least doubted by men. But women in the two parties also protestedagainst discrimination on several occasions. The more explicitly feminist womenfrom the Democratic Party or the Left had no monopoly on this.

One example of a woman being thrown into political life without muchpreparation was Anni Kalähne, who was DNVP representative to the Volkstag

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(diet) of the Free City of Danzig for most of the Weimar period. (AlthoughDanzig was under League of Nations sovereignty, its mostly German popula-tion had formed local branches of all major German parties.) All the politicalexperience Kalähne had was her political discussions with her father, the Pan-German historian Dietrich Schäfer. Yet the revolution and defeat, particularlythe threat of a Polish invasion or annexation of her home town, turned Kalähneinto a dedicated DNVP activist. She did not bother to ask her husband, whowas still in the army, for permission, when Käthe Schirmacher drafted her togive a patriotic speech in late 1918. Kalähne became a highly active politicianwell known in her home town as well as among the Germans in the contestedborder areas with Poland. Her husband, who also joined the DNVP, toleratedbut did not appreciate her political engagement; despite her frequent invita-tions, he never came to one of her speeches. Kalähne got a reputation as anationalist speaker not afraid of Polish or Socialist hecklers and rapidly builtup an impressive women’s organization for the DNVP in Danzig, but she feltpoorly prepared for parliamentary work and always had difficulties getting herideas heard within the DNVP. She quickly learned, however, that the mostpromising way to get her plans realized was to discuss them first with twoinfluential male members of parliament who were her friends, and then letthem present her ideas to the DNVP group as their own. Her two friendsopposed equal rights for women but took her ideas seriously, which most othermen did not. Kalähne, who was herself no feminist, complained that it wasimpossible for most of her male colleagues to admit that sometimes a womanhad a better idea than a man.3 The experiences she describes were probablyshared by many political women, particularly at the local and regional level.But few of them became as successful as Kalähne; many may simply havewithdrawn from politics.

Not only in daily work did women encounter prejudice and hostility, their verypresence in the parties and, particularly, in parliaments was contested.4 Thisangered the women in the DVP so much that they articulated their concerns asearly as the first party convention in April 1919. Ilse Szagunn, the chair of theGreater Berlin women’s committees, and a deputy from Bielefeld, Else Lange(not to be confused with Helene Lange, member of the Democratic Party andveteran of the women’s movement), claimed that there was still too much resist-ance against women’s political work in the party from men but also from women,who did not yet accept their new rights and duties. Szagunn asked the men in theparty to support the women better, and Lange attacked the injustices of demobi-lization to the many women who were dependent on their income. She criticizedin particular the fact that many well-educated men were ignorant of the women’smovement but still dared to make judgments on women’s issues.5 Party chairmanStresemann noticed that the discontent of the DVP women was expressed even

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more strongly in the hallways than in the speeches and thus decided to address itin his final speech. Women, he said, should not be concerned with the numericalaspect of their representation but should instead “send us the most able women,the ones who can work creatively. A single personality here can have a greatereffect than formal equality of numbers.”6 Stresemann admitted that men had theadvantage of longer political training but claimed that this would change. Headmonished women not to be concerned exclusively with women’s issues but toget involved in other matters as well. That would ease their acceptance by themen in the party. He further stressed that increased cooperation would overcomethe ignorance of the men, and that at some point men and women would worktogether so smoothly that no separate women’s committees would be necessary.7

Stresemann’s emphasis on personality over numbers jibed well with the DVP’sstress on individual values over numerical strength, but it did little to mitigate thefrustration of many DVP women. At the second party convention in October1919, the Prussian Landtag deputy Margarethe Poehlmann again expressed angerover the lack of understanding on the part of men, particularly the younger ones,and demanded that women receive a high position on every DVP ballot.8 In thewomen’s section of the DVP-Nachrichtenblatt the critique continued: EmmaStropp, member of the RFA, claimed that men reacted “with clearly manifestdiscomfort – to put it mildly” whenever women referred to the passage of theWeimar Constitution on equal rights, and she complained that newspapers sympa-thetic to the DVP still considered women’s issues unimportant.9 And LuiseMarelle, the DVP’s expert on women in the professions, commented that thewidespread anti-feminism of men had condemned women to passivity in parlia-ment. “Most female deputies chose the best option by not saying anything. (Onehears then that ‘they work well in the committees’).”10 The anger of the DVPwomen even intensified in the months preceding the Reichstag elections of June1920. Although the DVP anticipated a vast increase in seats, women received onlypoor consideration on the ballots. Stropp, who emerged as the DVP women’s mostvocal critic, mentioned that some women had threatened to withdraw their supportfor the party’s electoral campaign and that all women in the party were angry:“They experience the poor consideration accorded to female candidates on theballots as an offense to all women activists and as a sign of low esteem for theirpolitical activity and its importance for Germany’s recovery. Often a female candi-date has only been placed as a token candidate on a hopeless spot of the ballot.”11

The structure of Stropp’s critique was always the same: first came sharp attackson anti-feminism, combined with references to the fact that women formed amajority of potential voters and, in 1920, also a majority of DVP members; thenStropp admonished the DVP women to continue their precious work for the DVP– usually with strong nationalist undertones. Implicit was the threat that theywould stop if they were not better rewarded in the future.12

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When the DVP’s share of Reichstag seats tripled in June 1920, women’s repre-sentation kept pace with the party’s overall increase (three instead of one – andfour following a special election to fill the seat of a deceased male deputy inFebruary 1923). But frustration over limited acceptance by the men in the partyproduced more protests. In July 1920, Stropp wrote that women from all partiesshared the feeling that men ignored their concerns. It was at this time that shemade her powerful plea for women’s rights, so that women could help salvage anation that resembled a damaged ship in a storm.13 Stresemann took theseconcerns seriously enough to visit the women’s meeting preceding the thirdnational party conference in December 1920. In a speech to the assembledwomen, he admitted that the opinion of women had to be heard first on manymatters but rejected the charge that not enough women were represented in thenew DVP Reichstag group. Again he asked women to put the emphasis on abilityrather than numerical representation according to gender. In her response, JulieBassermann, the widow of Stresemann’s predecessor Ernst Bassermann, agreedbut demanded that this principle be applied to men as well; fewer men should getseats simply because they represented certain social strata or professions.Stresemann stayed for an open discussion of these matters and promised to makethe women’s concerns heard in the party leadership.14

Although Stresemann hardly made substantial concessions to the women inthe party, the fact that he listened to them, took their concerns seriously, andvisited their meeting did win him respect from the DVP women and may havehelped to mitigate their discomfort. Preceding the Prussian elections of February1921, the Prussian members of the RFA protested again that female candidateswere not receiving enough consideration, but they also admitted that too fewwomen were willing to compete for seats in parliaments because they consideredthemselves unqualified and preferred to let men represent their interests.15

Despite these claims, however, DVP women fared very well in the PrussianLandtag elections. There were six women in the DVP’s 58-member Landtaggroup (a seventh woman joined them in December 1922, replacing a man).Women thus made up 10.3 percent of the DVP’s Landtag group (12 percent after1922), much more than in any other bourgeois party in the Prussian Landtag –and the Reichstag. With its 12 percent from December 1922 on, the DVP had thehighest share of women in the Landtag, surpassing even the SPD (11.4percent)!16 It seems that the DVP leaders, and later their colleagues from theDNVP, agreed to give women better consideration for Prussian Landtag electionsthan for the Reichstag, claiming that “female” concerns such as social policyplayed a larger role there than in the Reichstag, where “male” concerns such asforeign policy and military matters were important.

The DVP women’s criticism of anti-feminism softened after the Prussian elec-tions of 1921, although there is little evidence that conditions in the party

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improved. In March 1924, with new Reichstag elections scheduled for May, theRFA secretary Martha Schwarz mentioned that many women had become disillu-sioned but continued to work for the party nonetheless, since it was woman’s natureto make sacrifices and to work.17 The RFA got the two “secure” places for womenon the national ballot that it had demanded, and both women on these places wereelected (Mende and Dr. Frances Magnus-von Hausen). Thus women lost one seatin the DVP Reichstag group, but it was also true that the party overall sufferedlosses. Unfortunately, women’s representation got no better when the DVP recov-ered some seats in the Reichstag elections of 7 December 1924. (Mende remainedand was joined by Elsa Matz.). At the Prussian Landtag elections of the same dateonly five women, instead of seven, got elected to the DVP group. Shortly there-after, Mende argued that politically active women had to remain alert, “so as tomake it clear to the men that there are essential differences between the sexes butthat there is no monopoly of men on certain portions of wisdom, logic, discretion,and political ability.” (Mende was referring to a DNVP proposal to exclude womenfrom sensitive foreign policy jobs because of their “inborn inability to keepsecrets.”)18 The elections to the parliaments of the Prussian provinces on 29November 1925 again triggered massive criticism from the DVP women becausethe regional party sections had largely ignored women candidates. In a letter toStresemann, Mende complained that “women, who from the start have done themost loyal and self-sacrificing work … are systematically being excluded from theparty’s work and even from their own spheres of activity.” The DVP’s ExecutiveBoard decided at its next meeting to write to the regional sections and to stress theimportance of women as candidates and members of parliaments.19

Criticism remained muted for several years. The female DVP activists knewthat, however difficult it was to overcome the prejudice of men, the disinterestand passivity of women did not help either. Stropp, for example, claimed thatmany women put too much trust in big-interest organizations and understoodneither why they should get politically active themselves nor why their rightsneeded to be expanded. The Prussian Landtag member Marie Siegert, moreover,explained that women’s political activism was lacking even in communal poli-tics, often described as the ideal stage for women’s political engagement becausewomen could work close to home; rarely could the DVP find enough womenwilling to run for election to city parliaments. Others pointed out that womenoften blindly trusted male candidates and were too divided and too critical ofeach other’s abilities.20 Some women in the DVP also denied that there was anti-feminism in the party; Käthe Rahmlow, a DVP activist from Dortmund, claimedthat women and men in her province (Westphalia) cooperated in a spirit ofcomplete camaraderie.21

In the DNVP, the women remained mostly quiet during the first years althoughthey were hardly treated better than their counterparts in the DVP. Initially some

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DNVP men suggested that women’s suffrage should be revoked, but most ofthem accepted it once they saw how much it benefited their party. The formerchair of the Conservative Party, Count Kuno von Westarp, for example, admittedthat he continued to oppose women’s suffrage but found it inopportune to expressthis opinion when he realized that women’s suffrage “did not have as radicaleffects as I had expected” and was impossible to revoke in the short run. Hedebated the issue with Behm, who told him frankly that politically active womendid not cherish his old-fashioned “chivalry” toward them but wanted equal rightsin the party, in politics, and in the professions. Westarp remained unconvinced ofthis goal but expressed respect for women’s work in the DNVP. In a telling rela-tivization of the equality claim, Westarp declared that he granted women allequal rights and practical possibilities necessary for their work.22 The women, inturn, did not challenge their place in the party nearly as much as the DVP womenhad done from the start. Clotilde von der Groeben, a member of the East PrussianLFA, claimed that men in general handled women’s interests well and that onlywomen representing major female professional groups had a right to sit in parlia-ments.23 Women reporting about their activities in local assemblies stressed thatthe men in the DNVP respected their work – often more so than men in theDemocratic Party and DVP seemed to do (although this may also have been dueto the fact that DNVP women challenged the men in their party less).24

The first open challenges to women’s work in the DNVP came from women,not men. In early 1919 some right-wing women outside the DNVP gatheredsignatures for a petition against women’s suffrage. The DNVP leadershipcondemned this action, however, and declared that people who supported it couldnot belong to the party.25 In 1920 Lenore Kühn had to counter the charge leveledby a woman in the extreme right-wing newspaper Deutsche Zeitung that theDNVP women had secret sympathies for the “democratic” BDF and for femi-nism and that the DNVP’s parliamentarians were not representative of Germanwomen because none of them was a mother. In her reply, Kühn denied feministsympathies and pointed out that mothers did their most valuable work at home,not in parliament, and that the example of Margarethe Behm showed that womencould be motherly even without being biological mothers.26 In 1922 an article inthe conservative Kreuzzeitung written by a woman associated with the socialorganizations of the Evangelical Church and the German League against theEmancipation of Women stirred up a conflict. The author attacked the DNVPwomen for putting feminist concerns over nationalist ones. While morality inGermany was sinking to unprecedented depths, the author claimed, Behm andMueller-Otfried were watching by the sidelines and trying to advance women’srights together with women from the Left. Instead, truly conservative womenshould stress that it behooves women to be self-sacrificing, obedient, andsubmissive to the authority of men.27 Kühn’s defense on behalf of the RFA was

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severely cut by the editors of the Kreuzzeitung, so she published the full articlein the Frauenkorrespondenz.28 Politically active DNVP women were angry at theway the Kreuzzeitung handled the affair, but party chairman Hergt and Westarp,as editor of the Kreuzzeitung, tried to make amends at a leadership meeting ofthe regional DNVP sections a few days later. Hergt praised the women’s work forthe party and stressed that they had always avoided a one-sided emphasis onwomen’s rights. Women had represented their interests within the party with tactand restraint and never tried to form a “state within the state.” Westarp explainedthe behavior of the Kreuzzeitung in ways that restored the honor of the RFA, andHergt appealed to all regional chairmen to further the work of women within theparty.29 The male party leaders thus defended women activists against the attacksby anti-emancipatory women by attesting to them that they had not worked forwomen’s rights. The irony of this may seem glaring to a present-day observer, butit is doubtful that most DNVP women saw it that way.

In the months before the Reichstag elections of May 1924, however, DNVPwomen expressed frustration over the poor consideration their candidatesreceived on the ballots – at a time when the DNVP expected gains at the polls.In the Deutsche Tageszeitung, the RFA published a call to women not to abstainfrom voting, but behind this plea lurked a critique of anti-feminism in the DNVP.Everywhere, the RFA claimed, the work of women was being pushed back andrestricted. It was understandable, though still to be condemned, if women reactedwith abstention.30 After the elections, the Reichstag group of the DNVP, whichhad become the strongest in union with the allied National Rural League(Reichslandbund, RLB), included four women, who had all been elected bynarrow margins. This was one woman more than before the elections but still aweak representation in comparison to other parties (just over 4 percent). After theelections, the DNVP journalist Beda Prilipp claimed that the party owed itsimpressive gains at the polls primarily to women. In a sideswipe at the economicinterest groups in the party, she added: “This has to be valued all the more,because the women of our party did not receive promises regarding any privi-leges.” Prilipp complained that the share of female parliamentarians had not keptpace with the growth of the party at the polls, and she was also alarmed aboutthe failure of Klara Klotz, the DNVP’s leading woman in Württemberg, to getreelected to the Landtag of Württemberg, where state elections were held on thesame day as the Reichstag elections. Altogether, she warned that the anti-femi-nism of the men in the DNVP would strengthen the Democratic Party and helprevive the ailing women’s movement.31 Like the DVP in 1921, the DNVP reactedto this criticism by making efforts to increase the women’s representation in thenext Prussian Landtag elections. The DNVP Landtag group elected in 1921 hadincluded five women in a group of seventy-five; after the elections of December1924 it had nine women in a group of 109, which raised the women’s share from

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6.67 to 8.25 percent. At the Reichstag elections, held on the same day, fivewomen instead of four were elected to a DNVP group that had hardly changedin size. Despite these modest improvements the conditions of women’s work inthe party remained difficult. In 1925, for example, the RFA complained to theparty leadership that many regional party sections refused to make enough fundsavailable to their women’s committees. This complaint induced the party secre-tary to send out an admonition to the chairmen of the regional branches to bettersupport women’s work within the party.32

When the electoral fortunes of the DNVP began to decline in the later 1920sdue to competition from special-interest parties, the pressure on female candi-dates increased again. At the Reichstag elections of 20 May 1928, the DNVP lostover one quarter of its seats, but women’s representation went down even moredramatically from five to two (Mueller-Otfried and Lehmann). In the PrussianLandtag, elected on the same day, the DNVP as a whole lost as heavily, butwomen’s representation went down only from nine to eight (their share thusincreased from 8.25 to 9.7 percent). The situation improved later in the yearwhen two women were elected to replace deceased male deputies, which gavewomen a record 12.2 percent of the DNVP’s seats. The decline of women’s repre-sentation in the Reichstag, however, came as a shock to many DNVP women.33

RFA chair Annagrete Lehmann showed that the reduced number of femaleparliamentarians meant a severe loss of expertise in all questions of concern towomen. The few remaining women would be overloaded with work. Consideringthat in electoral districts with gender-separated counting the DNVP had receivedbetween fifty-five and fifty-nine percent of its votes from women, the RFAcalculated that a strictly proportional representation would give women forty-twoof the seventy-two DNVP Reichstag seats. Instead they had only two (2.7percent) – the lowest share of any major party.34 But, as earlier, Lehmann admon-ished the DNVP women to redouble their efforts for the party, so that it woulddo better in future elections and offer women more seats.35

The crisis years after 1929 brought new challenges to women that will bediscussed later. What is important here is that they managed to defend theirparticipation in the parliamentary groups even though the decline of the twoparties’ share of the vote made it even harder for them to compete with men forthe few remaining seats. With more and more electoral districts electing only oneor two candidates – if any at all – for the DVP and DNVP, women had little hopeof winning a seat through the districts because they were almost never listedabove the third place on the district ballot. Thus, women were more dependentthan ever on their party’s list of candidates to be elected from the surplus votesof the local districts (Reichsliste or Landesliste). But it has to be said that themale leaders of the DVP and DNVP, by placing one or two women high on thatlist, made sure that women were always represented in their Reichstag groups.

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The proportion of women in the reduced party groups therefore did not decline.Ironically, it reached its highest point after the elections of July 1932, when theDVP had one woman (Matz) among only seven deputies (14.29 percent) and theDNVP still had three women out of thirty-seven (8.1 percent).

What weapons did women have against anti-feminism? One was directconfrontation, which was chosen for example by Käthe Schirmacher in a writtenexchange with her male party colleague Gottfried Traub, who sat withSchirmacher in the National Assembly. When Traub addressed her in a letter withthe diminutive “Fräulein” (Misses) used for an unmarried woman (and a neuternoun), Schirmacher sent back the envelope to Traub after having corrected“Fräulein” to “Frau” and written above: “The member of parliament is no neuterbeing. The woman representative carries the title ‘Frau’.”36 But Schirmacher’soutspoken defense of women’s rights angered and alienated many men andwomen in the party. When the district that had elected her to the NationalAssembly was separated from Germany, the DNVP leaders did not offer her apromising place elsewhere, thus ending her parliamentary career (though not herengagement in the party).37 A less dangerous and perhaps more common weaponagainst anti-feminism was irony, which the DVP women employed with mastery.Lange’s speech at the first party conference was full of it, and Reichstag deputyMargarethe Poehlmann used it at the second party conference when shesuggested that prejudice against women was proportional to the youth and inex-perience of men. The DVP’s household expert Hilde Margis added to this byclaiming that anti-feminism was often less visible in “men with distinctly mascu-line qualities” than in “other” men.38 Women from both parties often bolsteredtheir claims for better representation by pointing out that their parties receivedmore votes from women than from men. But this argument did not hold muchwater once the men realized that the placement of women candidates had littleinfluence over how women cast their votes.39 It also smacked of democracy,which both parties rejected; as Stresemann had argued, members of parliamentsshould be chosen for their abilities, not for the numbers of voters they repre-sented. Probably more effective was the argument that women worked for thegood of the nation and that Germany needed their full participation and input torecover. Women of the DVP and DNVP never got tired of saying that they did notprimarily represent specific women’s interests but worked to make women’sinnate abilities more beneficial to the whole nation.

Another weapon was the threat to form a women’s party or to create separatewomen’s ballots associated with the existing parties. The discussions about awomen’s party have been represented in much of the literature as a reaction tothe poor consideration for women’s interests demonstrated by the bourgeoisparties.40 Yet, the idea of a women’s party was more. Take the words of HeleneLange, the veteran and leading theorist of the bourgeois women’s movement,

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who in 1920 contemplated the mission of a women’s party on the followingterms: “The formation of a women’s party means to create an institution that willbasically serve the construction of the whole, the unification of interests, thereconciliation of conflicts – but not by horse trading on a case to case basis butrather by searching for ways in which truly national politics can be realized.”41

The women’s party thus was not meant to be just another economic “pressuregroup” but rather a reform party whose central mission, according to Lange, wasnothing other than the Volksgemeinschaft. Lange, and almost all others whodiscussed the women’s party, readily admitted that it was not feasible for prac-tical reasons, and separate women’s lists were rejected on similar grounds.42

Women from the DNVP and DVP echoed this judgment. Lenore Kühn, for theDNVP, admitted that not enough women were represented in the parties, but –like Stresemann – she considered personalities more important than numbers andbelieved a women’s party would become a powerless splinter party becausewomen were already too closely tied to the existing parties.43 Stropp, for theDVP, argued that a women’s party would increase political fragmentation incircumstances that called for national unity. Despite her bitter critique of anti-feminism, she claimed: “Politics can and should no longer … be dividedaccording to gender difference; this would be a grave sin against Germany’srecovery.” Rather than forming a separate party, women should work hard withinthe existing parties to overcome male prejudice, an argument Clara Mendesupported as well.44 But Stropp got so exasperated over anti-feminism in May1920 that she warned that a women’s party would soon become a reality if mendid not help enforce the equal rights clause of the Weimar Constitution.45 Annavon Gierke, the DNVP deputy in the National Assembly who left the partybecause of its anti-Semitism, did indeed create a local women’s list for theGreater Berlin town elections in July 1920. The DVP women observed thisexperiment with interest and presented it to their party leaders as a manifestationof women’s dissatisfaction with the existing parties.46 This was ill considered,however, because von Gierke’s list received only 936 votes, not even enough forone seat in Berlin’s city parliament. Paula Mueller-Otfried saw this result as aconfirmation of the DNVP women’s rejection of a women’s party. She arguedthat women’s interests were too heterogeneous to fit into one party, but she alsowarned that women would not support indefinitely a mixed party that claimed totake care of women’s interests by tolerating a few women in parliaments as repre-sentatives of all women.47 A second experiment with a women’s list in Münsterin 1928 did not fare much better than von Gierke’s.48 The discussion of awomen’s party was powerfully revived in the early 1930s, when the growth of theanti-feminist NSDAP threatened to undercut women’s demands in the otherparties.49 But the consensus remained that a women’s party would stand nochance at elections and would only serve to further the alarming fragmentation

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of bourgeois party politics and thus exacerbate the very ills of German politicallife that women were so eager to cure.

Whereas men in the rightist parties hardly took the discussion of a women’sparty seriously, they felt threatened by the cooperation of women across partylines. The women in the DVP were usually more open-minded about such coop-eration than women from the DNVP. In the Greater Berlin area, the DVPwomen’s committees took an active role in the founding of a local umbrellaorganization for women’s groups, the Political Cooperative of the Women ofGreater Berlin (Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Frauen von Groß-Berlin).This organization evolved out of the old Berlin League for Women’s Suffrage(Berliner Verein für Frauenstimmrecht) and included women from the Left anda broad spectrum of bourgeois organizations. Its goals were to deepen women’spolitical education and to work for equal rights for men and women. It insistedon the broadening of women’s access to all professions and on equal pay forequal work, and it claimed to be a forum for the issues that united women fromall parties. The chairwoman was Adele Schreiber, a Social Democrat. Althougheven some DNVP members (notably Margarethe Behm) belonged to the boardof this organization, the DVP was much more engaged than the DNVP.50 EmmaStropp wished that the Political Cooperative of the Women of Greater Berlinwould help overcome the disinterest and ignorance that many female DVPmembers displayed toward the women’s movement, and the DVP’s Anna Mayerappealed at the organization’s constitutive meeting to revive women’s solidarityacross party lines.51 The DNVP, however, soon denounced the PoliticalCooperative as too feminist and too hostile to the parties. The DNVP’sFrauenkorrespondenz largely ignored it.52 After less than a year, even DVPwomen got worried that the organization would take a too pacifist stand, butwith demonstrations against the “Black Horror on the Rhine” and an exhibitionabout production with the use of German rather than foreign materials thePolitical Cooperative reemphasized its nationalist credentials.53 This wasenough to ease the concerns of DVP women for the time being, but they appearto have lost interest after 1923. The DNVP women, in turn, tended to downplaycommon women’s concerns and became thoroughly antagonistic to women’scross-party cooperation in the later years of the Weimar Republic, whenHugenberg led the DNVP into sharp opposition to the Weimar system and allmoderate parties. As the DNVP’s Erika Altgelt argued in 1929, DNVP womenrecognized no common basis of women’s politics, claiming that such a thing didnot and should not exist. In a similar vein, Annagrete Lehmann wrote in 1931that women’s solidarity was worthless, even destructive, if it did not imply acommon stand based on a shared world-view.54 Although women from allparties chose to focus on similar political fields, powerful ideological divides –particularly between socialist women and the religious women associated with

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the Center Party and the DNVP – undercut the chances for a consensus amongwomen in the parliaments.

On balance, women successfully defended their position in the two partiesthroughout the Weimar Republic, but they did so by consistently stressing theircommitment to the nation and the party and by limiting or downplaying theirstruggle for specific women’s interests. One time when women in the DVP gotparticularly frustrated over the men’s lack of support for their work, for example,Mende called on the women not to fall prey to “female egoism” but rather tocomprehend and fulfill the civic and political duties of women toward the partyeven more deeply and seriously.55 In the DNVP, women always put so muchmore stress on women’s duties than on their rights that they hardly needed topublish such disclaimers against “female egoism.” This went so far that in early1924 Reichstag member Hedwig Hoffmann from Bochum, who had succeededa deceased male DNVP deputy in December 1921, exchanged her spot on theballot for a less promising one so as to make room for a male worker likely toattract more votes than she was expected to receive.56 The male party leadersoccasionally lent an open ear to women’s concerns, as shown by Stresemann’sdiscussions with DVP women, the DNVP secretary’s answer to the RFA’s requestfor more funding, or both parties’ efforts to strengthen women’s representation inthe Prussian Landtag. But the confinement of women to fields stereotypicallydefined as “female,” though emphatically encouraged by most right-wingwomen, left them little prospect of expanding their influence and advancingwomen’s rights, as many may have hoped after the introduction of women’ssuffrage. It did, however, help to increase their representation in the influentialPrussian Landtag, where there was a stronger emphasis on “women’s fields” thanin the Reichstag.

Notes

1. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei, pp. 70–1.2. Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik:

Politische Kommunikation, symbolische Politik und Öffentlichkeit imReichstag (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002), pp. 104–8, and Heide-MarieLauterer, Parlamentarierinnen in Deutschland 1918/19–1949 (Königstein(Taunus): Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2002), pp. 70–85. In a survey of parlia-mentarians in the National Assembly and the Reichstag, Claudia Koonz hasshown that there was a significant minority of men who were also new. Themajority, however, had been in the Reichstag before 1919, and this wascertainly true for the leadership of the parties. Koonz, “ConflictingAllegiances,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 1(1976): 666–70.

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3. Anni Kalähne, “Lebenserinnerungen,” in Staatsarchiv Bremen, NachlassDietrich Schäfer, folder 7.21.

4. See the case study on DDP women in Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerlicheFrauenbewegung in Deutschland, pp. 162–6.

5. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei, pp. 47–8,66–7, and 70–1.

6. Ibid., pp. 94–5.7. Ibid. Stresemann had expressed similar ideas at meetings of the DVP’s

Executive Board: Kolb and Richter, eds., Nationalliberalismus in derWeimarer Republik, pp. 13 and 30 (meetings of 29 January and 13–14 April1919).

8. Bericht über den Zweiten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 18., 19. u.20. Oktober 1919, pp. 130–2.

9. Emma Stropp, “In Arbeit getreu,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 1, 2 January1920, and E. St. [Stropp], “Die Reichsfrauentagung,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt2, no. 16, 22 April 1920.

10. Luise Marelle, “Antifeminismus und Berufswertung,” DVP-Nachrichten-blatt 2, no. 19, 13 May 1920.

11. Emma Stropp, “Wahlmüdigkeit?” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 20, 20 May1920.

12. [Emma Stropp], “Das Wort der Frau während der Wahlvorbereitung,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 9, 13 May 1920.

13. As quoted above in the “Introduction” (from Emma Stropp, “Der neueReichstag,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 26, 1 July 1920).

14. “Die Reichsfrauentagung in Nürnberg,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt, 2, nos.48/49, 9 December 1920.

15. “Sitzung des Reichsfrauenausschusses (preußische Mitglieder),” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 3, 20 January 1921.

16. For the results, see DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 8, 24 February 1921.17. Martha Schwarz, “Frauenwürde und Wahlkampf,” NLC 51, no. 45, 26

March 1924. See also Clara Mende, “Die Frau als Vertreterin ihres Volkes,”NLC 51, no. 60, 23 April 1924; Ender’s statements in “Fünfter Parteitag derDeutschen Volkspartei in Hannover am 29. und 30. März,” special edition ofNLC; and Martha Schwarz, “Tagung des Reichsfrauenausschusses,” NLC51, no. 46, 1 April 1924.

18. C.M. [Clara Mende], “Kampf gegen Frauen,” NLC 52, no. 38, 25 February1925.

19. Kolb and Richter, eds., Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer Republik,p. 649 (meeting of 27 January 1926).

20. Emma Stropp, “Verantwortlichkeit,” Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4,no. 15, 7 August 1922; Marie Siegert, “Frauenarbeit im Stadtparlament,”

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NLC 51, no. 157, 25 September 1924. See also “Frauenkandidaturen,”Berliner Stimmen 1, no. 21, 24 December 1924.

21. Käthe Rahmlow, “Wege und Ziele weiblicher Politik,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 33, 19 August 1920.

22. Kuno von Westarp, Konservative Politik im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zurRepublik. Teil I: Von der Deutschkonservativen Partei zur Deutsch-nationalen Volkspartei. Manuscript, Nachlaß Westarp, Gärtringen, chap. 4.

23. Clotilde von der Groeben, “Frauenvertretung in den Parlamenten,” DerParteifreund 2, no. 11, 17 March 1921.

24. Margarethe Pohle, “Aus der Erfurter Gemeindevertretung,” Frauen-korrespondenz 3, no. 17, 20 May 1922, and “Parlamentarische Kleinarbeitdeutschnationaler Frauen in Provinz- und Gemeindevertretungen,”Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 21, 29 July 1922.

25. Scheck, “German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in the EarlyWeimar Republic,” p. 45; Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei2, no. 35, 11 February 1919. See also “Zurückweisung einer demokratischenVerdächtigung,” Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 2, no.200, 1 September 1919.

26. LRK [Lenore Ripke-Kühn], “Frau und Volksvertretung,” Frauen-korrespondenz 1, no. 18, 15 May 1920. The opinion that women did theirbest for the state as mothers and housewives was typical for anti-emancipa-tory arguments. Compare the statements of Hans Philipp, member of theGerman League Against the Emancipation of Women, in a newsletter of theNational Liberal Party: “Die Anteilnahme der Frau am Staatsleben,” DieFrau in der Politik. Monatsbeilage der “Deutschen Stimmen” 1, no. 2, 24February 1918, p. 13, in BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–42 (DVP), vol. 16.

27. “Wir und die Anderen,” Neue Preußische Kreuzzeitung, no. 88, 21 February1922 (evening).

28. Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 12, 4 March 1922, and no. 13, 18 March 1922.See also “Die Frauen in der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” Neue Preuß-ische Kreuzzeitung, no. 107, 4 March 1922.

29. Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 14, 1 April 1922.30. “Wahlaufruf zum 4. Mai 1924,” Deutsche Tageszeitung, no. 187, 20 April

1924; copy in Reichslandbund-Pressearchiv, BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, vol.7988, p. 3.

31. Beda Prilipp, “Und die Frauen – ?” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 21, 28 May1924.

32. Rundschreiben 103 (9 May 1925), in Niedersächsisches StaatsarchivOsnabrück, Erw. C 1 (DNVP), vol. 17, part 2, p. 109.

33. The RFA also mentioned poor results for women in other state elections on20 May. There were elections in Anhalt, Bavaria, Oldenburg, and

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Württemberg, but I did not find evidence that the DNVP had any women inthose parliaments immediately preceding the 1928 elections. The RFAclaimed that after 20 May 1928 Johanna Richter (in Baden) was the onlyDNVP woman in any state parliament except Prussia, but that is not accu-rate. There was still a DNVP woman in the diets of Hamburg, Lübeck,Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and Saxony. In the early 1930s, DNVP womenreturned to the diet of Bremen and Württemberg.

34. Annagrete Lehmann, “Zum Wahlausfall,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 22,31 May 1928, and “Die Wahlbeteiligung der Frauen,” Frauenkorrespondenz10, no. 23, 7 June 1928.

35. “Deutschnationale Frauen in den neuen Parlamenten,” Frauenkorres-pondenz 10, no. 21, 24 May 1928; Annagrete Lehmann, “Zum Wahlausfall,”Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 22, 31 May 1928.

36. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Nachlass Traub (N 1059), volume 67 (correspon-dence).

37. Walzer, Käthe Schirmacher, p. 89.38. Hilde Margis, “Wir Frauen und die Wahl,” NLC 51, no. 67, 2 May 1924.39. Boak, “Women in Weimar Politics,” p. 385.40. Focusing on the Democratic Party, Barbara Greven-Aschoff has shown that

women became frustrated when time and again they got pushed to lowerplaces on the ballot by representatives of powerful economic interestgroups: Greven-Aschoff, Bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, pp. 162–66.

41. Helene Lange, “Politische Zerstörungsmethoden,” Die Frau 27, no. 7 (April1920): 193–5.

42. Greven-Aschoff, Bürgerliche Frauenbewegung, p. 158; Boak, “Women inWeimar Politics,” pp. 386–8; and Evans, The Feminist Movement inGermany, p. 247. See also the discussion on the women’s party at a BDFboard meeting in October 1930, in Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauen-vereine in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 257–65.

43. LRK [Lenore Ripke-Kühn], “Frauenlisten und Frauenparteien,” inFrauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 4, 18 October 1919; see also Lenore Ripke-Kühn, “Frauenfragen und Parteiarbeit,” Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 9, 27December 1919.

44. Emma Stropp, “In Arbeit getreu,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 1, 2 January1920; Clara Mende, “Frauenarbeit in der Partei,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2,no. 2, 8 January 1920.

45. Emma Stropp, “Clara Mende und andere,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 21,27 May 1920.

46. Emma Stropp, “Die Groß-Berliner Stadtwahlen von allgemeinen Gesichts-punkten betrachtet,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 23/24, 17 June 1920.

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47. Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Frauenlisten oder Mitarbeit in der Partei,”Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 22, 10 July 1920.

48. Lotte Garnich, “Frauenlisten,” Berliner Stimmen 5, no. 17, 10 November1928.

49. In 1931, Martha Schwarz (DVP) again reminded her readers that the discus-sion of a women’s party was not about special interests: Martha Schwarz,“Frauenpartei?!” NLC 58, no. 166, 27 August 1931. See also Kardorff-vonOheimb, Brauchen wir eine Frauenpartei? (Berlin-Frohnau: Verlag fürKultur und Wissenschaft, 1931).

50. “Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Frauen von Groß-Berlin,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 1, no. 12, 18 December 1919.

51. Emma Stropp, “Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Frauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 2, 8 January 1920; “Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaftder Frauen von Groß-Berlin,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 8, 19 February1920.

52. E. St. [Emma Stropp], “Verrat an der eigenen Partei,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt2, no. 10, 4 March 1920.

53. M. Regenbogen, “Die politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt2, no. 47, 25 November 1920.

54. Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 41, 10 October 1929; Annagrete Lehmann,“Vormarsch der nationalen Opposition,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 14,15 October 1931.

55. Clara Mende, “Frauenarbeit in der Partei.” For similar statements withregard to the priority of national interest, see Emma Stropp, “Der neueReichstag,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 26, 1 July 1920, and Stropp, “InArbeit getreu,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 1, 2 January 1920.

56. Die Frauen im neuen Reichstag,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 19, 10 May1924.

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–4–

Women’s Rights and Housewives’ Power

The state has to consider higher interests than the loss of a woman civilservant. If this civil servant gets married, has children, and raises them inthe enclosed sphere of the family, a higher interest is served.

Magdalene von Tiling, DNVP (1928)1

The broad hostility toward women in politics as well as the ideology of right-wing women limited their ability and willingness to advance women’s rights.Their engagement for women’s rights was slanted toward the concerns of someselect professional groups, and it was regarded with suspicion by the representa-tives of urban and rural housewives, who had different priorities than profes-sional women. Even when DVP and DNVP women took up the cause of women’srights, they often weakened their momentum because they insisted that womenshould work primarily in “female” spheres and that the role of housewife andmother was woman’s ideal profession. This has to be understood in the contextof the widespread perception that the suffrage had been a terminal achievementfor women and automatically gave them full equality. Even women from theDemocratic Party, which prided itself on its openness for women’s concerns,complained that many men and women from their party believed that women’sissues did not matter any more after the suffrage had been won.2 Right-wingwomen, of course, had always tended to regard even women’s suffrage withambivalence or downright hostility. They stressed after 1918 that the only way touse the suffrage was to make women’s influence felt for the benefit of the wholenation and not for specific women’s issues, as becomes clear in a speech by theDNVP’s Magdalene von Tiling: “… only the thought of the Volksgemeinschaftand the damage that has to be repaired urges woman to leave her narrow privatesphere. This is not at all a question of women’s rights …”3 Although all leadingright-wing women believed that women now had to permeate society with theircultural influence, they continued to stress that they had not entered Weimar poli-tics to advance women’s rights. Frequently they denied in public that they wereinterested in women’s rights per se and, in keeping with their Volksgemeinschaftideology, emphasized that they pushed for women’s rights only whenever theirneglect threatened to harm the nation.4

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Yet, important women’s rights issues had to be addressed. Although theConstitution adopted in August 1919 granted women equal rights “in principle”and stressed equal rights for men and women in the professions and in marriage,the German civil law code and the criminal code remained discriminatory towardwomen and needed to be changed.5 Women still received lower pay for equalwork, faced restricted opportunities for advancement, and were excluded fromsome careers. In civil law, women were disadvantaged particularly in marriage;married women had almost no legal power over their income and property orover the education of their children. The DNVP women formulated a program in1920–21 that addressed most of these injustices and promised to redress them.Their program stressed equal rights as a principle and demanded support forworking women including equal pay for equal work.6 The DVP women insistedon similar concerns and convinced their party in 1919 to include the demand forequal standing for women and men in politics, law, and economic life in the partyprogram.7

Although women from the DVP and DNVP initially considered the revision ofthe civil law code important, they paid little attention to basic women’s rights lateron. Given their widespread notion of women fulfilling different tasks than men,right-wing women did not even fight to cut the addendum “in principle” from theconstitutional clause that stated that women and men had equal rights. Thisformulation established a gray zone for laws that discriminated against women,but when a motion came before the National Assembly to cut the words “in prin-ciple,” the DNVP women helped to defeat it. Mende, the only female DVP deputyin the National Assembly, was absent during the vote.8 Some women from bothparties sought to impart a greater understanding of the injustices contained in thecivil law code and to commit their parties to fighting them. Dr. Anna Mayer, theDVP’s expert on women and the law, campaigned for redress of the clauses thatmade family law discriminatory toward women, although she refused, in accor-dance with the idea of essential differences between men and women, to demandsymmetrical rights for husband and wife.9 Erna von Birkhahn, as member of theDNVP’s RFA, argued along similar lines, while Else von Sperber in the Reichstagand Elisabeth Spohr in the Prussian Landtag tried to strengthen the legal power ofthe divorced mother over the upbringing of the children.10 Yet, efforts for a revi-sion of women’s rights in marriage and family frequently got lost in parliamentarydiscussions, and no vocal economic-interest group stepped in to pressure thelawmakers. Not even a comparatively minor issue came to a solution: the right ofa woman who married a foreign national to choose between her citizenship andthe citizenship of her husband. In Germany, as in many other countries, a womanautomatically lost her citizenship when she married a foreign national.International women’s organizations pressed for a harmonization of national lawcodes and for the right of women to choose, although they disagreed on the desir-

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ability of mixed-nationality marriages.11 For German women politicians, thequestion had some importance because after Versailles many German citizenslived in foreign countries where women might lose all contact with Germany aftermarrying a foreign national and thus forfeiting their German citizenship. TheDVP Reichstag group, led by Matz, Doris Hertwig-Bünger, and Wilhelm Kahl,requested a revision of the German law in 1928, and the DVP women’s presscontinued to push for the woman’s right to choose.12 The DNVP women agreedin principle that the woman should choose her nationality but worried aboutmixed-nationality couples in wartime. The Reichstag twice recommended a revi-sion of the law, but the government did nothing.13

One area where women from the DVP and DNVP became more active was thedefense of women’s right to work. Right-wing women recognized that, given thelarge “women surplus” after the war and the hard economic times, women weredependent on access to the professions and needed to be protected there as muchas possible. Already during the first national party conferences, the DVP womenpushed their colleagues hard to recognize that women needed to work. Whileattempting to direct women mostly to “female” jobs, the women of the DVPinsisted that the party address the rights and needs of working women.14 In aspeech published as a pamphlet, the DVP’s Bavarian Landtag representativeGertraud Wolf in 1921 pushed for an extension of women’s rights in the profes-sions. She criticized the mass dismissal of women in the course of demobiliza-tion in 1919–20 (which Mende, however, had supported in late 191815),demanded equal salaries for equal work for men and women, and encouragedwomen to strengthen their professional-interest organizations.16 Throughout the1920s, DVP women promoted specific rights for professional women, but theGreat Depression again put the legitimacy of women’s presence in the profes-sions under attack. DVP women once more had to stress that most womenneeded to work in order to support their families and relatives and that thesummary dismissal of women would not solve the problem of mass unemploy-ment. These arguments also belonged to the arsenal with which DVP womentried to fight the Nazi challenge after 1930.17 The DNVP women pledged tosupport the expansion of professional women’s rights in their programs, but theystressed even more strongly than the DVP that women, with only a few excep-tions, should choose “women’s” professions. The DNVP’s Elisabeth Spohr, forexample, often fought for equal rights for professional women in the PrussianLandtag, but she also emphasized that a woman should not be “degraded” tobeing a man’s competitor on the job market.18 Beate Bartels, a contributor to theFrauenkorrespondenz, went so far as to praise domestic service as the idealwomen’s profession and an excellent character-building school for women; sheargued that by encouraging obedience and humility, domestic service was thebest path to the realization of the “German ideal of womanhood.”19

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A primary battlefield for women’s professional rights was the status ofmarried female civil servants. Although they constituted only a very smallpercentage of all employed women, their status attracted much attention becausethe employment practices of the state could serve as a precedent for the treatmentof the much larger group of married women working in the private sector.20 Until1919, German law forced women in the civil service to quit their jobs and to giveup their pension claims when they got married. The Weimar Constitution abol-ished this rule, but various government decrees designed to reduce the numberof civil service personnel in 1923 reintroduced some of the old restrictions. Thisconcerned some well-organized professional women, above all the postal andtelegraph workers (in the service of the Reich) and the school teachers (in theservice of the states). Both of these groups had representatives in the DVP andDNVP. Yet, their interests differed slightly. The Union of the Female Postal andTelegraph Workers (Verband der deutschen Reichspost- und Telegraphen-beamtinnen, VRPT) refrained from pushing hard against the state’s right todismiss married civil servants because most of the union’s members were youngand did not expect to keep their jobs as telephone operators or telegraph trans-mitters after marriage. Their interest was, above all, to get a compensationpayment for lost pensions. Female teachers, however, had longer training andoften felt a life-long, personal commitment to their jobs; they therefore moreforcefully resisted dismissal because of marriage – regardless of compensation.21

The status of the married civil servant was entangled with other contentiousissues, such as the programs to cut civil-service jobs (Beamtenabbau) and thedebate over the privileged status of civil servants. Given the strained finances,the Reich and state governments often looked to married women in the civilservice as a tempting target for job cuts, claiming that these women were“double-earners” and could, if dismissed, rely on the income of their husbands.The bourgeois parties often feared, however, that the dismissal of tenured femalecivil servants might poke a hole into the system of life-long job security in thecivil service, a privilege already under attack by the working-class parties. For along time this conflict obstructed a permanent settlement of the issue. From 1923on, the Reichstag and various state governments adopted temporary rulings thatallowed the dismissal of married women from the civil service in exchange for atoken compensation. In 1929 the Reichstag reinstituted the original clause fromthe Constitution, which satisfied women who cherished job security but angeredthose women who wanted to quit when they got married and needed the indem-nification payment to start a family. Yet at a time of renewed pressure on theemployment of married women (and of women in general), the Reichstag in May1932 passed a law that allowed the Reich to dismiss women after marriage inexchange for a small compensation payment. Most German states had similarbills in the pipeline, which quickly became laws in the Third Reich.22

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In their argumentation over this highly publicized issue, women from the DVPand DNVP generally stressed the woman’s freedom to choose whether shewanted to quit or to combine work and family. Beginning with the debates on theConstitution in the National Assembly, women in both parties argued – againstinitial opposition from men in the DNVP – that a woman who felt able to recon-cile work and family should be allowed to stay in her job. If she chose to quit,however, she should receive compensation for the pension payments that shewould forfeit. Both parties, together with the VRPT, for many years followed thisline of argument.23 Under the pressure of the economic crisis after 1929,however, the DNVP women became more conservative, justifying the right of thestate to dismiss female civil servants – except in economic emergencies – whilestill stressing that the dismissed woman deserved a compensation payment. Theytherefore welcomed the law of 1932.24 The DVP women, represented by ElsaMatz in the Reichstag, Anny von Kulesza in the Prussian Landtag, and DorisHertwig-Bünger in the Saxon Landtag and the Reichstag, defended the women’sright to stay in their jobs more energetically and stressed that only a few “double-earner” couples were wealthy enough to survive on the husband’s incomealone.25 The DVP women thus were critical of the law of 1932. Elsa Matz, theonly woman in the DVP Reichstag group at that time, abstained during the votewhile the men of her party joined the DNVP, NSDAP, Center Party, and SPD inpassing it.26 Yet, while defending women’s right to keep working after marriage,women from both parties agreed that women ideally should leave employmentwhen they got married, so as to devote their energies to their “most important”tasks as mothers and housewives. Paula Mueller-Otfried of the DNVP expressedthis in a Reichstag debate in 1923 when she said: “… in all parties, I assume, thewish prevails to lead as many women as possible to their most satisfying andnormal occupation – being a wife and mother.”27 Women from both partiesfeared that having to decide between dismissal without compensation andmarriage would tempt a woman to enter into illicit love relationships and thusaccelerate the widely proclaimed decline of morality.28 The state should there-fore facilitate the transition of the female civil servant from work to motherhoodthrough a compensation payment.

A more specific question was whether a woman in the civil service who hadan illegitimate child should be dismissed without any compensation. The interestorganizations of professional women disagreed on this. Pointing out that publicservants should serve as role models, the VRPT demanded that the woman civilservant with an illegitimate child should be subject to disciplinary measuresincluding dismissal, whereas the Union of Female Civil Servants in the SocialSector opposed any disciplinary action.29 This was a thorny topic because therewas no agreement on whether the law should treat fathers and mothers of illegit-imate children the same way (some disciplinary procedures that were less

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dramatic than dismissal were already in place against the fathers of illegitimatechildren). In the spring of 1922 the issue was debated in the Reichstag, with theDNVP and the Center Party insisting on the immediate dismissal of a femalecivil servant with an illegitimate child. Mueller-Otfried argued, however, thatmale civil servants with illegitimate children should continue to face punitiveconsequences, too. The DVP, represented by Mende, refused to follow theDNVP’s hard line and demanded that each case be examined on its own.30

During the final vote, however, the Center Party switched sides to vote downpunitive measures for the mother of an illegitimate child in the civil service,whereas the DVP joined the ranks of the DNVP in the minority that insisted onautomatic disciplinary measures. The DNVP women, together with the VRPT,argued that the existing law disadvantaged men by leaving in place some disci-plinary procedures against the fathers of illegitimate children while grantingwomen freedom from prosecution. The DNVP’s Hedwig Hoffmann-Bochumclaimed in the Reichstag that the law, by giving women this freedom, wouldfurther undermine the sanctity of marriage, but her comments provoked thelaughter of many deputies from other parties, as the DNVP women’s press notedwith outrage.31 In their continuing struggle against this provision, DNVP womenwere supported by men in their party.32

Apart from civil servants, some other professions also attracted the attentionof women from the two parties. They agreed, for example, that the exclusion ofwomen from the legal professions was a major injustice. The DNVP women’sprogram of 1921 demanded that women be allowed to work as lawyers and beconsulted in all trials involving young people. Women from both partiessupported bills designed to broaden women’s rights in the legal professions in theReichstag and various state parliaments.33 Yet, they had to proceed cautiouslybecause many men in their parties rejected the opening of this prestigious malepreserve to women and because many women of the rank and file and in the localparty organizations shared this reaction. In March 1921, Mueller-Otfried andBehm caused a stir when they broke party discipline and voted for a CommunistReichstag bill providing for women’s right to serve on juries.34 Men in the DNVPReichstag group were outraged, and local party women insinuated that theparty’s female Reichstag representatives here were advancing the selfishwomen’s rights agenda that they had promised to shun.35 The Communist-spon-sored bill, however, failed to get the approval of Germany’s Federal Council. Thequestion therefore returned to the Reichstag, which discussed another billproposing to give women access to jury duty in April 1922.

During the new debate, two men took the stage for the DVP and DNVP, withwomen making some informal comments during their speeches. For the DVP,Wilhelm Kahl, one of the most respected deputies, argued that service in juriesdid not accord with the nature of women and that men simply did not like being

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judged by women. Kahl claimed that a majority of German women would rejectthe bill if they were asked. When a socialist woman denied this claim, womenfrom the bourgeois parties interrupted her and said that Kahl was right. TheDNVP’s speaker, Adelbert Düringer, supported the bill but pointed out that manyin his party did not. Düringer admitted that “a healthy and natural feeling forjustice” was as likely to be found in women as in men and that women would bestricter than men when judging crimes involving brutality or sexual violence. Heand the women of his party had tried to build exemption clauses into the law thatwould have allowed women to reject jury duty during menstruation, but thisamendment had failed. The bill passed on 6 April 1922 with the votes of mostDNVP and DVP representatives.36 When a bill allowing women to becomejudges came before the Reichstag not much later, the majority of the DVPdeputies including its women supported it, whereas the DNVP voted against it.Leading DNVP women had supported the idea of women as judges, but itappears that resistance against it in the party – among men and women – wasparticularly strong. Already during the debates on women’s jury service theDNVP women had been forced to deny that the admission of women to jury dutywas a precedent for women’s right to serve as judges.37

The buildup of a female police force was another initiative that opened oppor-tunities for women in traditionally male areas while respecting accepted genderdifferences and hierarchies. The DVP’s Anna Mayer, who occupied a high posi-tion in the Prussian Ministry of People’s Welfare, helped direct a pilot project totrain and deploy women in the police for specific jobs – mostly the surveillanceof prostitutes, the interviewing of children in “problem families,” and other tasksat the intersection of law enforcement and social work. Mayer argued that thefemale police force showed how women’s enlarged influence could work for thewelfare of state and society without undermining the women’s maternal abilities.The DNVP watched these efforts with interest. When Elisabeth Spohr addressedthe issue in the Prussian Landtag in 1928 she did not object to women in thepolice per se but argued that, given the strained state finances, the female policeshould rely primarily on unpaid volunteers. She probably hoped that the femalepolice would thus broaden the activities and the influence of religious social-work organizations allied with the DNVP.38 When Saxony adopted a projectsimilar to Prussia’s, the DVP’s Saxon Landtag representative Doris Hertwig-Bünger found it necessary to stress that the female police was no competition tomen in the police forces because the women would receive a different trainingand take over different tasks. She had to justify, in particular, the fact that thewomen in Saxony received some training in the use of a weapon, which sheconsidered necessary for self-defense.39

Of special interest to the women of the DVP and DNVP were domesticemployees and midwives. Both became important because of socialist initiatives.

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The SPD and the Communist Party wanted to extend basic workers’ rights todomestic employees, who had until 1918 stood under a restrictive special law, theGesindeordnung. Domestic employees, virtually 99 percent women, shouldreceive the right to a limited work day and a vacation, maternity protection, anda more specific definition of the tasks they had to perform. Separate bills weredebated in 1921–22, 1925, and 1927–30, but the legal situation of domesticemployees, who still made up one ninth of all employed women in 1925,remained unresolved; a bill was passed by the Reichstag in 1930 that was neverfully implemented.40 With respect to midwives, the Prussian Landtag passed anSPD-sponsored reform law in 1922 that established professional standards formidwives and gave them some social security. But this law had to be revokedbecause its provisions for a state-controlled network of midwives were found tocontradict the law of free movement.41

In both cases, the bourgeois parties opposed what they saw as the socializationof professions that allegedly relied on women’s idealism and defied standardlabor regulations. The female politicians of the DVP and DNVP, who took centerstage in the discussion of these issues, agreed that the relationship betweenservant and employer was too personal to allow for a rigid contract in accordancewith the labor laws applicable in other professions. They pointed out that thedemands of housewives, who usually supervised domestic servants, required anunusual flexibility on the part of the domestic personnel particularly duringfamily reunions and during the housewife’s pregnancy and childbearing times.Clearly, bourgeois women wanted to protect the rights of employers at a timewhen the economic decline of the German middle classes made domesticservants hard to afford. Many specific issues were debated: the right of theservant to vacations, the maximum period of work without a break, the right ofthe servant to go to church on Sundays, the registration of domestic employees(including a photo-identification card), protection for the servant before andafter the birth of her own child, and many others. Whereas the DVP women, withtheir close links to the urban housewives’ league (RDH), generally took the sideof the employers, the DNVP could not disregard the interests of the femaledomestic servants, who often voted for it. The DNVP women, feeling pressurefrom the interest organizations of both sides, thus tried to mediate between thetwo and to avoid a clear stand. This was made possible because the domesticemployee organizations allied with the DNVP were very moderate in theirdemands and agreed with the housewives on many arguments against greatersocial security.42 On midwives, the DVP and DNVP women sought a compro-mise between mothers and midwives, with whose professional organizationsboth parties kept in contact. While recognizing the need to give more job secu-rity to midwives and to establish standards for their training and work, DVP andDNVP women tried to minimize state control and maximize the choice of

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mothers. In the Prussian Landtag, Margarethe Poehlmann of the DVP attackedthe SPD bill on midwives as an attempt to socialize this profession and to depriveChristian women of their right to choose a Christian midwife. Her speechreceived broad applause from the Center Party and the right wing of the Landtag,and Elisabeth Spohr later articulated similar points for the DNVP.43 But the DVPand DNVP women supported the bill after it was revised so as to give mothersthe free choice of a midwife.44

Another labor group consisting primarily of women had powerful defendersmostly in the DNVP: the workers employed in domestic industry. This group, adescendant of the proto-industrial cottage system, did manual piecework at homefor a distant merchant, usually combining this work with farm and householdtasks. This type of work was widespread in some regions of Saxony, Thuringia,and Silesia, particularly in the production of refined textiles and toys. Peopleemployed in the home industry lacked most of the social provisions that coveredworkers in factories.45 DNVP women often argued that work in the domesticindustry should be promoted because it allowed women to reconcile work andfamily and helped small family farms that would not be financially viablewithout the extra income from the domestic industry.46 Margarethe Behm, asfounder and leader of the Union of Female Home Workers, was the mostoutspoken advocate of this labor group. She used her Reichstag seat to pushthrough social-security legislation for the workers of the home industry, culmi-nating in the passage of a bill granting them extensive insurance coverage in1922.47 Recognizing her role in this success, the press dubbed the law the “LexBehm.”48 Her engagement for poor women won her the reputation of being a justand caring mother (or grandmother), and she came to be called “Muttel” Behm(a tender version of “Mother Behm”). On her sixty-fifth birthday in 1925, theMedical Faculty of the University of Greifswald awarded her an honorarydoctorate.49

The interest of one women’s group, however, dominated the agenda of right-wing women on women’s issues: the housewives. The economic pressures of theFirst World War had made most Germans painfully aware of the importance ofhomemaking. Nobody doubted any more that the role of the housewife as aconsumer, as a daily preparer of food, and – in the countryside – as a producerhad national importance. Schirmacher had expressed this most powerfully in1918: “The world war has taught us that cooking and homemaking are service tothe country, defense of the country, and a form of citizenship. Not only the swordis a weapon – in the ‘hunger war’, the cooking spoon is equally important.”50 Thewar had indeed triggered a movement to professionalize homemaking so as tomaximize the use of scarce food resources. An avalanche of scientific informa-tion and practical advice became available to housewives, who were also recog-nized as extremely important consumers – given that two-thirds of the national

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wealth went through their hands every year. Mindful of many women’s triple loadof household, family, and work, home economics experts encouraged women toadopt effective time management, rationalize the household, and adopt certainguidelines for shopping. During the war, urban and rural housewives had formedtheir national interest organizations, the RDH and the RLHV. The economiccrises of the Weimar years lent renewed urgency to the efforts begun during thewar, and the housewives’ movement gained mass support. In 1922 the league ofurban housewives (RDH) had 250,000 members, and the membership of theleague of rural housewives (RLHV) peaked around 100,000 in 1929.51

Housewives’ representatives campaigned to get homemaking recognized as aprofession. Many of them saw homemaking and motherhood as woman’s truecalling and were suspicious of the claims of women in other professions. Theywanted to upgrade the public image of homemaking and to make it economicallyviable for more (middle-class) women to devote their full energy to the house-hold and family.

Most DVP and DNVP women agreed with the housewives’ leaders onwomen’s ideal calling. In defense against the charge that few politically activewomen were married and had children, Lenore Kühn had explained that mothersand housewives should not be burdened with political work.52 From this notionfollowed the claim, however, that single women active in politics had to work forthe interests of housewives and mothers. The concerns of housewives indeedstood at the center of the DVP’s and DNVP’s political agenda on women. Kühnherself was very much aware of this when she worked for the RFA in the early1920s. In daily contact with the DNVP’s women deputies in the Reichstag andthe Prussian Landtag, she often felt alienated by their excessive stress on house-wife issues and their apparent disinterest in educated professional women. Aftergetting particularly exasperated about her work, she confided to her diary in June1921: “Oh, I wish I was rid of it all, particularly because we academics are reallynot wanted. The best thing would be to give up my academic title.”53 But Kühn,with her high-flying intellectual interests, probably expressed the point of viewof a small minority.54 References to the household as the model for male-femalecooperation appeared frequently in the statements of right-wing women. Theyoften suggested that the common sense of the housewife should be inserted intopolitics and occasionally represented themselves as the housewives in the partyhousehold, charged with making new members feel welcome and at home.55

Mende, in particular, stressed the contribution the common sense of housewiveswould make to political life. She argued that Germany’s economy in the FirstWorld War would have worked much better had the authorities drafted morewomen with housekeeping skills into the administration, and, in a critique of menin the National Assembly in 1919, she claimed that women tended to be moreenergetic and practical because of their household experience.56

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The personal connections between the parties and housewives’ groups arestriking.57 The rural housewives were strongly involved in the DNVP. The leaderof the RLHV, Elisabet Boehm, belonged to the RFA of the DNVP. The urbanhousewives of the RDH had their closest ties to the DVP. Maria Jecker, chair ofthe RDH from 1927 on, belonged to the National Women’s Committee of theDVP. Housewives’ activists were also represented in the parliamentary groups ofboth parties. Among the most notable in the DNVP were Therese Deutsch fromEast Prussia, who sat in the Prussian Landtag 1921–1932 (with a short interrup-tion in 1928), Else von Sperber, also an East Prussian who sat in the Reichstagfrom May 1924 to May 1928, and Elsa Hielscher-Panthen from Silesia, whoserved in the Prussian Landtag from 1924 to 1932. All three were respected ruralhousewives’ representatives. Another expert on rural homemaking was thehome-economics teacher Maria Schott (born 1878), who sat in the Landtag ofSachsen-Weimar and later the Reichstag (March 1923 to May 1928). Twooutstanding representatives of urban housewives in the DNVP were HedwigHoffmann-Bochum, an urban home-economics expert from Bochum sitting inthe Reichstag from 1921 to 1924, and the Silesian noblewoman Freda Freifrauvon Rechenberg, who served in the Prussian Landtag from 1924 to 1928 and wasthe vice-chair of the RFA from 1927 to 1932.58 In the Landtag of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the DNVP’s Hanny Voß represented housewives’ interests, and theDNVP also included some well-known housewives without parliamentary seats,such as Martha Voß-Zietz, who chaired the RDH in the early 1920s, and BerthaHindenberg-Delbrück, a nationally known activist for the same organization inHanover.59 Besides Jecker and Clara Mende, who had built up her own home-economics school in Berlin-Tempelhof, the DVP boasted Charlotte Mühsam-Werther, the housewives’ representative on the National Economic Council, in itsranks. The DVP’s most important representatives of housewives in parliamentswere Milka Fritsch, Reichstag member 1923–24, and Lotte Garnich, PrussianLandtag member 1919–1924. Hedwig Heyl, the prestigious founder of the urbanhousewives’ movement, was active for the DVP in the city parliament ofBerlin.60 Finally, Hilde Margis, a well-known home-economics expert, was chairof the DVP housewives’ committee.

Given the intense connections between the housewives’ leagues and the twoparties, it comes as no surprise that the DVP and DNVP women supported ener-getically the policies of these leagues. The “buy German” campaigns of the twohousewives’ leagues, in particular, received outspoken support in the women’spress of the DVP and DNVP. Women from both parties criticized the preferenceof German consumers for white flour over the “German” rye and for tropicalfruit over apples grown in Germany. They also encouraged the purchase ofGerman consumer goods by stressing the superior quality of German-madecrafts over mass-produced foreign goods – a misleading argument because many

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German goods were also mass-produced. Sometimes the “buy German” argu-ments became rather absurd, as when Else von Sperber mixed health argumentswith racial notions in 1930: “In the nordic countries, in particular, the oncealmost exclusive consumption of rye has led to a beautiful, tall, and stronghuman type.” (Sperber failed to explain, however, why this had presumably nothappened in Poland, where the diet was equally dominated by rye.61) Mendealways wrote “meat” in quotation marks when she meant imported meat, and theDNVP’s Martha Voß-Zietz admired Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s measuresto restrict the import of foreign food: “How can a responsible citizen today notwish for a man like Mussolini, who ends with a strike of the pen the import ofbananas and teaches Germans to eat German apples …?”62 Mussolini’s declara-tion of a weekly “rice day” to further the appreciation of Italian rice also receivedthe praise of a DNVP commentator, who wished that the German governmentwould introduce a “rye bread day”.63 In the charged nationalist atmosphere of thepost-Versailles period, buying German produce and consumer goods appeared asa national duty. The leading women in the two parties often backed up their “buyGerman” campaigns with calls for higher tariffs on foreign food and consumergoods. This policy, of course, appealed to the economic interests of importantvoter groups – the East Elbian landowners in the DNVP and small producers andretailers in the DVP.

In close contact with the housewives’ leagues, women from the two partiesalso supported efforts to teach German housewives more efficient ways ofcooking and housekeeping. They displayed interest in new developments inhousehold machinery, architecture, and city planning, and they reported exten-sively about exhibitions on these topics. DNVP women in the Prussian Landtagsecured state funds for agricultural schools and research institutions, and theDVP’s Hilde Margis was instrumental in building up a network of courses forurban housewives.64 The stress on household rationalization, however, was notalways intended to ease the household work of employed women or to free thehousewife so that she could get paid employment outside the house. DNVPwomen, in particular, hoped that efficient housework would give the (bour-geois) housewife more time for the education of her children and more oppor-tunities for increasing the size of the family – an important task in view ofDNVP women’s worries about the low birthrate, particularly that of the middleclass.65

The leading women in the DVP and DNVP knew that the availability of cheaplabor was of concern to both housewives’ leagues. Right-wing women thereforesupported various schemes for a compulsory service year for girls in an urban orrural household. This measure would have ensured a steady supply of essentiallyfree labor to housewives (in fact, some proposals even stipulated that the girlswould pay for their “training”!). Also, women in the DVP and DNVP took into

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account the housewives’ opposition to labor legislation upgrading the rights ofdomestic employees and rural workers – with the DNVP being more constrainedhere by virtue of its ties to domestic employee organizations.66 Since theproposals for a compulsory service year never came to fruition in the WeimarRepublic, right-wing women supported the buildup of voluntary service arrange-ments instead.67 The housewives’ leagues helped to facilitate such arrangements,while one organization made women’s service and preparation for housework itsprimary aim: the German Young Women’s Service (Deutscher Jungmädchen-dienst). Founded in 1923, it enjoyed support from the women of the DVP andDNVP. In its camps, young women learned basic housekeeping, nursing, andinfant-care skills and enjoyed the hiking, marching, and fireside singing typicalfor so many German youth leagues of the period.68 Several right-wing womensuggested that the Jungmädchendienst become a model for the compulsoryservice year. Should this happen, DNVP Reichstag deputy Maria Schottpredicted that “a physically and morally healthy Volkstum would blossomagain.”69

In conclusion, the women from the DVP and DNVP pushed for women’srights in some areas but their initiatives often lost their bite due to the women’sown argument that women’s rights should not always be equal to men’s rightsbecause women were not equal to men. If one considered motherhood andhousekeeping as women’s first and “natural” duties, then fighting against thedismissal of married female civil servants did not make much sense – particu-larly if the state agreed to ease the dismissed woman’s transition to house-keeping and motherhood by paying her a compensation sum. Making house-keeping more viable and more effective appeared as a worthy cause, and nointerest organization of women had as much power and representation in theDVP and DNVP as the housewives’ leagues. Their concerns therefore domi-nated the women’s agenda of the two parties, and the discrimination of womenin the civil law code received far less attention. Here, the BDF, as the umbrellaorganization of German bourgeois women, was widely considered the groupcharged with doing the political legwork, but it was hampered by its strongestmembers, the two housewives’ leagues.70 Whereas the weight of the house-wives’ organizations often acted as a brake on women’s rights demands in theDVP and DNVP, it worked as a push for most of their initiatives with regard tofamilies, youth, education, and morality.

Notes

1. Magdalene von Tiling, “Die verheiratete Beamtin und Artikel 14 der Reichs-Personalabbau-Verordnung,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 51, 20December 1928 (supplement).

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2. W. Krobiell, “Frauen und deutsche Demokraten,” in Das DemokratischeDeutschland 1918/19, no. 36 (17 August 1919): pp. 839–40, in GStA Berlin,XII, III, vol. 10.

3. See the summary of Tiling’s speech: “Tagung des erweiterten RFA der Dn.Vp.”, Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 4, no. 284, 3December 1921.

4. See for example Elisabeth Cimbal, “Frauenausschüsse und ihre Arbeitsgebiete,” Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4, no. 2, 29 January1922.

5. Frevert, Women in German History, p. 170; Jill Stephenson, Women in NaziSociety (London: Croom Helm, 1975), p. 6; for a good summary of theissues, see Britta Lohschelder, “Die Knäbin mit dem Doktortitel”.Akademikerinnen in der Weimarer Republik, Forum Frauengeschichte 14(Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1994), pp. 8–15.

6. “Deutschnationale Frauenpolitik: Richtlinien der DeutschnationalenVolkspartei für Frauenfragen,” p. 31; “Grundsätze der DeutschnationalenVolkspartei vom Jahre 1920,” in Liebe, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei,pp. 112–19 (points 10 and 29).

7. “Der Parteitag in Leipzig,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 1, no. 5, 30 October 1919.On the genesis of the party program, see Wolfgang Hartenstein, Die Anfängeder Deutschen Volkspartei 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1962), pp.106–20. See also Clara Mende, Die Deutsche Volkspartei zur Frauenfrage(Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1919), p. 7.

8. Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland1894–1933, pp. 168–9.

9. Anna Mayer, Die Rechtsstellung der Ehefrau und der ehelichen Mutter,Flugschriften der Deutschen Volkspartei III-9 (Berlin 1921).

10. Erna von Birkhahn, “Eherechts- oder Ehescheidungsreform?” Frauen-korrespondenz 11, no. 19, 9 May 1929; Elisabeth Spohr, “Die elterlicheGewalt der Mutter,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 17, 28 April 1927.

11. Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),pp. 146–8.

12. Elsa Matz, “Die Staatsangehörigkeit der Ehefrau,” NLC 57, no. 231, 27November 1930. See also VdR 1930–1932, vol. 445, pp. 1419–20.

13. “Staatszugehörigkeit der Ehefrau,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 2, 14January 1925; Eli Nathans, “Political Rights and Ethnic Duties: CitizenshipRegimes and the Nationality of Married Women in Germany, France, andthe United States, 1900–1930,” unpublished manuscript (2001). See also EliNathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility andNationalism (Oxford: Berg, forthcoming July 2004).

14. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 13. April

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1919, pp. 70–1, and Bericht über den Zweiten Parteitag der DeutschenVolkspartei am 18., 19. u. 20. Oktober 1919, pp. 180 and 205.

15. See Clara Mende, “Neue Aufgaben für die deutschen Frauen,” Die Frau inder Politik. Monatsbeilage der “Deutschen Stimmen” 1, no. 11, 24November 1918, p. 83, in BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–42 (DVP), vol. 16: “… nowoman may leave a returning soldier insecure about his job, not even for aminute.”

16. Gertraud Wolf, Frauenberufsfragen und Politik, Flugschriften der DVP 53,Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1921 (in GStA Berlin, XII, III, vol. 16).

17. See, for example, Martha Schwarz, “Frauen in der PreußischenUnterrichtsverwaltung” and “Leistungsprinzip oder soziale Gehälter,” bothin NLC 59, no. 28, 11 February 1932, and J. Lange, “Das junge Mädchen,”NLC 59, no. 34, 18 February 1932. On the reaction to the Nazi challenge,see below, Chapter 9.

18. Elisabeth Spohr, Deutschnationale Vertretung der Fraueninteressen in derPreußischen Landesversammlung (Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriften-vertriebsstelle, n.d. [1920?]), pp. 3 and 14–17.

19. Beate Bartels, “Die Frau gehört ins Haus,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 22,2 June 1927. See also Elisabeth Spohr, “Berufswahl der Mädchen,” Frauen-korrespondenz 9, no. 7, 17 February 1927.

20. According to the census figures of 1925, there were only about seven thou-sand married women in the civil service, as compared to 3.7 million marriedwomen working outside the civil service (2.5 million of them were workingtogether with the husband in the family business or the family farm) and atotal of 11.5 million working women. These numbers were probably evenlower during the Depression. See Lotte Garnich, “Krise undFrauenberufsarbeit,” NLC 59, no. 23, 4 February 1932, and Rosa Kempf,Die deutsche Frau nach der Volks-, Berufs- und Betriebszählung von 1925(Mannheim: Bensheimer, 1931).

21. Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, pp.172–80; Frevert, Women in German History, pp. 197–8; Ursula Nienhaus, “‘Neue Frauen’ im öffentlichen Dienst: Der Frauenverband der deutschenPost- und Telegraphenbeamtinnen (1905–1933).” Internationale Wissen-schaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung34, no. 3–4 (1998): 426–40.

22. “Gesetz über die Rechtstellung [sic] der verheirateten Beamtin,” Deutsch-nationale Frau 14, no. 10, 15 May 1932; Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerlicheFrauenbewegung in Deutschland, p. 173.

23. See “Frauenfrage,” in Deutschnationaler Rednerführer 1920, pp. 264–5;Hildegard Goetting, Deutschnationale Vertretung der Fraueninteressen inder Deutschen Verfassunggebenden Nationalversammlung (Berlin, 1921),

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p. 7; and Annagrete Lehmann, “Abfindungssumme für verheiratete Beamtinabgeschafft,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 13, 28 March 1929.

24. Annagrete Lehmann, “Rechtliche Stellung der verheirateten Beamtin undLehrerin,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 3, 1 May 1931. Ilse Neumannadvanced the same argument in the Prussian Landtag: “Aus demPreußischen Landtag,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 17, 1 December 1931.

25. Anny von Kulesza, Frauenfragen der Gegenwart, Flugschriften derDeutschen Volkspartei 79 (Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1931), pp. 9–11.See also Doris Hertwig-Bünger’s Reichstag speech in VdR, 1928–1930, vol.424, pp. 1547–8; “Die Unkündbarkeit der verheirateten Beamtin,” NLC 56,no. 67, 28 March 1929; and Anny von Kulesza, “Frauenarbeit –Doppelverdiener,” NLC 58, no. 37, 19 February 1931.

26. “Gesetz über die Rechtstellung [sic] der verheirateten Beamtin,”Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 10, 15 May 1932, and “Reichstags-entscheidung zur Frage der verheirateten Beamtin,” NLC 59, no. 105, 2 June1932.

27. As quoted in Frauenkorrespondenz 5, no. 6, 23 May 1923.28. For the DNVP, see Magdalene von Tiling, “Die verheiratete Beamtin.” For

the DVP: DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1924, pp. 508–9, and DVP-Wahlhandbuch1928, pp. 437–8.

29. See the resolution of the VRPT in Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no. 18, 11 June1921, and Nora Hartwich, “Die uneheliche Mutterschaft der Sozial-beamtin,” Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 10, 4 February 1922.

30. For a summary of the Reichstag debate, see Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 15,22 April 1922.

31. “Aus Rt. und Lt.,” Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 20, 15 July 1922. See alsoVdR, 1920–1924, vol. 354, p. 6932.

32. See Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 21, 29 July 1922, and “Aus Rt. und Lt.,”Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 20, 15 July 1922. For the support of ReinhardMumm, also a DNVP Reichstag deputy, see Reinhard Mumm, “Der Kampfum die Ehe,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 37, 17 September 1924.

33. “Deutschnationale Frauenpolitik,” p. 31; DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1924, pp.506–7.

34. Die Deutschnationale Fraktion des Reichstags und die ReichsregierungenFehrenbach u. Dr. Wirth (Juni 1920–August 1921), DeutschnationalesHandbuch 8, Berlin 1921, pp. 108 and 233.

35. Ilse Prehn, “Über weibliche Laien- und Berufsrichter,” in Der Parteifreund2, no. 23, 9 June 1921; for a resolution of the women’s group of Königsbergagainst women in juries, see Der Parteifreund 2, nrs. 27/28, 7 July 1921,and on the reaction of DNVP men: Nachlass Westarp, Gärtringen (inprivate possession), Briefwechsel 1920–22, A–Z. See also Ute Planert,

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Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht,1998), p. 247.

36. VdR, 1920–1924, vol. 354, pp. 6913–18. For the text of the law, see Reichs-gesetzblatt Teil 1, Jahrgang 1922. Berlin: Verlag des Gesetzessammlungs-amts, 1922, p. 465.

37. “Nochmals: Die Frau als Schöffin und Geschworene,” Frauenkorres-pondenz 2, no. 18, 11 June 1921; Die Frau in Familie und Staat,Deutschnationales Rüstzeug 7, Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriften-vertriebsstelle, 1924, p. 20 (in: GstA Berlin, XII, III, vol. 2); LRK [=LenoreRipke-Kühn], “Weibliche Schöffen und Geschworene,” Frauenkorres-pondenz 2, no. 14, 9 April 1921.

38. Anna Mayer, “Weibliche Polizei in Preußen,” NLC 54, no. 38, 23 February1927; “Weibliche Polizei,” Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 13, 25 March 1926;“Aus dem preußischen Landtage,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 7, 16February 1928. See also DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1928, pp. 435–6.

39. Doris Hertwig-Bünger, “Weibliche Polizei,” NLC 54, no. 82, 3 May 1927.For background, see Ursula Nienhaus, Nicht für eine Führungspositiongeeignet: Josefine Erkens und die Anfänge weiblicher Polizei inDeutschland, 1923–1933 (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999).

40. Ingrid Wittmann, “‘Echte Weiblichkeit ist ein Dienen’ – Die Hausgehilfin inder Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus.” In FrauengruppeFaschismusforschung, eds., Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch: Zur Geschichteder Frauen in der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus.(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1981), pp. 15–16; Frevert,Women in German History, p. 195; Ute Gerhard, Unerhört: Die Geschichteder deutschen Frauenbewegung (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990), p. 364; RenateBridenthal, “Class Struggle Around the Hearth: Women and DomesticService in the Weimar Republic.” In Michael Dobrowski and IsidorWallimann, eds., Towards the Holocaust: The Social and EconomicCollapse of the Weimar Republic. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp.247–51.

41. Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 52–3.

42. Freda von Rechenberg, “Zum Hausgehilfengesetz,” Frauenkorrespondenz12, no. 1, 2 January 1930; F.W., “Hauswirtschaft und soziale Lasten,” NLC55, no. 53, 22 March 1928; Maria Jecker, “Zum Entwurf eines Gesetzesüber die Beschäftigung in der Hauswirtschaft,” NLC 56, no. 168, 20August 1929; Theone Polaczek, “Ein Wort zur staatsbürgerlichenErziehung der Hausangestellten,” NLC 57, no. 165, 27 August 1930. TheDNVP usually invited representatives of both sides to meetings on thisissue: See the speech by domestic employee Auguste Rhode at the big

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DNVP women’s meeting in 1921: “Frauenversammlung der Deutsch-nationalen Volkspartei,” Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no. 11, 26 February1921. For evidence of the conservatism of a domestic employee unionlinked with the Catholic Church, see Wittmann, “ ‘Echte Weiblichkeit istein Dienen,’ ” p. 23.

43. VdL, 1919–1921, vol. XII, pp. 15557–65 and 15599–15601. See alsoMargarethe Poehlmann, “Das Hebammengesetz,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3,no. 5, 3 February 1921.

44. Margarethe Poehlmann, “Das neue preußische Hebammengesetz,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 37, 15 September 1922, and Elisabeth Spohr, “Derneue Regierungsentwurf des Hebammengesetzes,” Frauenkorrespondenz 2,no. 21, 23 July 1921. See also VdL, 1921–1924, vol. VIII, pp. 10596–7.

45. Jean H. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy,1885–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 35–6 and165–74; Barbara Franzoi Bari, “‘… with the wolf always at the door …’:Women’s Work in Domestic Industry in Britain and Germany.” In Marilyn J.Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, eds., Connecting Spheres: European Women ina Globalizing World, 2nd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2000).

46. Erika Altgelt, “Erhaltung der Heimarbeit,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 36,20 May 1925.

47. Reinhard Mumm, “Der Ehrentag Margarethe Behms,” Der Parteifreund 3,no. 14, 15 April 1922.

48. Ibid.49. Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 1, 7 January 1925.50. Käthe Schirmacher, Frauendienstpflicht. Bonn: Marcus und Weber Verlag,

1918, p. 6.51. Bridenthal, “Class Struggle around the Hearth,” p. 246, and Bridenthal,

“Organized Rural Women and the Conservative Mobilization of the GermanCountryside in the Weimar Republic.” In Larry E. Jones and JamesRetallack, eds., Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in theHistory of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (Providence andOxford: Berg, 1993), p. 390.

52. Lenore Kühn, “Frau und Volksvertretung,” Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 18,15 May 1920.

53. BA Koblenz, Nachlass Kühn, vol. 8 (diary 1921–22), entry of 22 June 1921.54. Besides, she downplayed the high respect other DNVP women still showed

for her at this time: “I am highly respected and miserably paid.” BAKoblenz, Nachlass Kühn, vol. 8 (diary 1921–22), entry of 11 July 1921.

55. See the appeal of the DNVP’s National Women’s Committee inFrauenkorrespondenz 2, no. 13, 26 March 1921, and Luise Marelle,

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“Antifeminismus und Berufswertung,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 19, 13May 1920.

56. See Mende’s speech, in 10 Vorträge gehalten auf der Schulungswoche inDarmstadt vom “Deutschen Frauenausschuß zur Bekämpfung derSchuldlüge.” (1925), in BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–121, p. 41, and Clara Mende,“Die praktische politische Arbeit und die Frauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 1,no. 3, 17 October 1919. Mende did not imply that women should take overthe tasks of men. She merely signaled that if women acted in their fields asenergetically as an efficient housewife did, men would do their part, too.

57. On housewives’ issues, see Renate Bridenthal, “‘Professional’ Housewives:Stepsisters of the Women’s Movement.” In Renate Bridenthal, AtinaGrossman, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny:Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press,1984), and Bridenthal, “Organized Rural Women;” Schmidt-Waldherr,Emanzipation durch Professionalisierung?; Nancy Reagin, “ComparingApples and Oranges: Housewives and the Politics of Consumption inInterwar Germany.” In Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and MatthiasJudt, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American ConsumerSocieties in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998); and Nancy Reagin, “The Foreign Housewife andthe German Linen Cabinet: Household Management and National Identityin Imperial Germany.” In Ute Planert, ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht:Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main:Campus, 2000). See also the extensive literature cited in Karen Hagemann,“Of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Housewives: Everyday Housework and the Limits ofHousehold Rationalization in the Urban Working-Class Milieu of theWeimar Republic.” International Review of Social History 41 (1996):305–30 (here pp. 306–7).

58. Annagrete Lehmann, “Zum Wahlausfall,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 22,31 May 1928.

59. On Hindenberg-Delbrück, see Nancy Reagin, A German Women’sMovement (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,1995), pp. 226–32.

60. On Heyl, see Heidi Koschwitz-Newby, “Hedwig Heyl. Die beste HausfrauBerlins.” In Christiane Eifert and Susanne Rouette, eds., Unter allenUmständen. Frauengeschichte(n) in Berlin (Berlin: Rotation Verlag, 1986).

61. Else von Sperber, “Unser täglich Brot –,” Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 13,27 March 1930.

62. Martha Voß-Zietz, “Kauft deutsche Waren!” Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no.3, 16 January 1930; Clara Mende, “Das Interesse der Hausfrau an derSteuer- und Zollpolitik,” NLC 52, no. 160, 1 September 1925.

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63. Dr. Wanda Anger, “Warum Roggenbrot?” Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 18,1 May 1930.

64. Hilde Margis, “Der Aufgabenkreis für die Rationalisierungsbestrebungenim Haushalt,” NLC 54, no. 151, 25 August 1927, and Margis, “Sachlichkeitund Lebensführung,” NLC 57, no. 10, 16 January 1930; “Tagung desReichsfrauenausschusses der Deutschen Volkspartei,” NLC 54, 27November 1928 (special edition). See also Deutsch’s speech in VdL,1924–1928, vol. XII, pp. 17686–9.

65. Elisabeth Spohr, “Volkserstarkung oder Untergang,” Frauenkorrespondenz6, no. 28, 16 July 1924; Reagin, A German Women’s Movement, p. 231. Theinformation about effective cooking and housekeeping may well have beenappreciated broadly, but the economic constraints made a mechanization ofthe German household a unique prerogative of the upper classes. SeeReagin, “Comparing Apples and Oranges,” pp. 243–5 and 254, andHagemann, “Of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Housewives,” p. 305.

66. Bridenthal, “Class Struggle around the Hearth,” pp. 251–3; Reagin, AGerman Women’s Movement, p. 232; Bridenthal, “Organized RuralWomen,” pp. 396–8.

67. See, for example, Asta Rötger, “Vom freiwilligen Arbeitsdienst der Frauen,”Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 18, 15 September 1932; Hannah Brandt,“Dienst,” Frauenkorrespondenz, 22 December 1923; Elisabeth Spohr,“Frauendienstpflicht,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 26, 2 July 1924; IlseSzagunn, “Idee der Arbeitsdienstpflicht,” NLC 52, no. 4, 5 February 1925.

68. “M.S. [Martha Schwarz], “Deutscher Jungmädchendienst,” NLC 51, no.126, 1 August 1924; Hannah Brandt, “Völkische Erziehung der deutschenJungmädchen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 25, 25 June 1924.

69. Maria Schott, “Die weibliche Jugend und die Erwerbslosenfürsorge,”Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 29, 23 July 1924.

70. Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine in der Weimarer Republik, chapters 2 and 3.

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–5–

Family, Youth, and Morality

The German women see their main task as the preservation and strength-ening of the German family. It is for us a positive moral value, the basicform of an ethical community, and the basic unit of all cultural life.

Marie Bernays at the DVP’s national conference in October 1919.1

Studies by Claudia Koonz and Helen Boak on the parliamentary activities ofwomen from all Weimar parties show that women spoke mostly on topics closeto their agreed “maternal” sphere: education, family, social policy, and morality.2

Although foreign policy mattered more than these studies suggest, and enoughto justify an extra chapter below, this characterization fits most of the politicalactivities of DVP and DNVP women. The DVP, for example, had twenty womenrepresentatives in the Reichstag and the state parliaments in early 1924, and allbut one were members of the social-policy committee of their parliament; four-teen of them also belonged to the committee on cultural policy, which dealt witheducation and matters of morality. The DNVP women showed a preference forthe same committees.3 The men in the two parties never questioned that womenshould take the lead in social and cultural affairs and generally supported theirwork in these fields.

Women from both parties saw the family as the central unit and corner stoneof the Volksgemeinschaft. They tended to conceive of their party and the Germannation as an extended family in which they played the role of the mother andhousewife.4 Just as they saw the Volksgemeinschaft, imagined as a nationalfamily, threatened by dissolution, they also believed that the actual family inGermany was in crisis. It did nothing to diminish the passion of their argumentsthat the “happy” family life of before 1914, which they contrasted with thepostwar situation, resembled more a nostalgic vision than a memory of reality.As the main dangers to the postwar family they identified the economic and exis-tential distress caused by the strains of war and the upheavals of the postwarperiod. Also, the buildup of the secular Weimar state, attempts by the Left to“socialize” the family, and the widespread decline of religious feeling alarmedright-wing defenders of the family. They feared that hedonistic individualism andtolerance for public displays of immorality were eroding the ethical foundations

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of marriage and parenthood at the same time as the material conditions forfamily life deteriorated. Overworked men and women no longer seemed to havethe time and will to foster a harmonious, nurturing, and religious family life forwhich they often lacked a basic precondition: an adequate apartment. The resultof this trend appeared to be the decline of the birthrate, which all right-wingGermans considered a threat to the military strength they hoped Germany wouldregain in the future. This analysis of the situation induced women from the twoparties to support a variety of legislative measures to benefit families (particu-larly large ones), to halt the secularization of education, and to rein in publicdisplays of immorality.

The DVP women were often torn between their religiously motivated conser-vatism with regard to family and morality and their liberal preference for indi-vidual autonomy. Whereas they worked out several compromises between thesepositions, they never wavered on their goal to increase the birthrate in Germany,a concern motivated by their nationalism. As early as at the second national partyconference of the DVP in October 1919, Marie Bernays, a DVP representative inthe Landtag of Baden and director of a social women’s school in Mannheim,stressed that the preservation of the German family was the foremost task ofGerman women. She appealed for measures in favor of families with many chil-dren and argued that the decline of the birthrate was not due to new professionalopportunities for women, as critics of women’s emancipation claimed, but ratherto the economic plight of the middle classes.5 In the following years, womenfrom the DVP consistently advocated state support for kinderreiche (“child-rich”or large) families. Through tax relief and rent subsidies, the state shouldencourage Germans to have more children and improve the situation of thosewho already had many children. In the rhetoric of DVP women, a “healthy”family policy and support for large families were the same thing. The DVPsupported several Reichstag interpellations calling on the government to helplarge families and to better protect mothers after childbirth.6 When new censusfigures released in 1925 showed a further decline of the birthrate, Elsa Matzwarned in a leader article for the Nationalliberale Correspondenz that theGermans would soon become a dying people. Criticizing a bill that would haveworsened the situation of large families, she asked: “Who wonders in the face ofthese facts that in Germany the ‘fear of having a child’ constantly increases?”7

In a similar vein, she demanded that the government fund more research into thecauses of German emigration.8 To bolster their argument for the national impor-tance of an increased birthrate, DVP women occasionally alluded to France,where the birthrate had declined that much earlier than in Germany. ElseBroekelschen-Kemper, a DVP deputy in the Prussian Landtag, drew a particu-larly alarmist picture in 1929. Regarding the single child as power-hungry andgreedy, Broekelschen-Kemper argued that the preponderance of single-child

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families in France had replaced an older hospitable culture with a selfish, hedo-nistic society and that the low birthrate had created a labor shortage leading tothe decline of agriculture and the rise of foreign immigration.9

Concern about the birthrate also informed the policies of DVP women in otherissues regarding the family. With respect to the status of illegitimate children, forexample, the DVP women adopted a compromise formula between their reli-giously motivated will to protect marriage and their aim to increase the birthrate.They opted for improving support for the illegitimate child while insisting on theinferiority of the child’s position compared to the position of legitimate chil-dren.10 The legalization of abortion, which was demanded by several billspresented by the Communists and the SPD, drew opposition from the DVP notonly for religious reasons but also because of fears regarding the decliningbirthrate. Dr. Ilse Szagunn, as the DVP’s medical expert, defended the illegalityof abortion but supported a reduction of the severe punishments for it.11 A billdrafted along those lines passed in 1926 with the votes of the DVP, the socialistparties, and the Democratic Party, but it was opposed by the DNVP and CenterParty.12 The reform of divorce law, debated in the Reichstag in 1926, had a lesscompelling connection to the birthrate but forced the DVP and its women to steera middle course between religious respect for marriage and liberal criticism ofthe cumbersome and prohibitive divorce regulations of German civil law. Toprotect the family, DVP women wanted to ensure that divorce could not beachieved easily, but they also recognized that in some cases marriages wereunsalvageable and should be ended.13

DVP women did not ignore the social conditions that worked against largefamilies, such as low income and inadequate housing. When advocating relief ofthese conditions, DVP women had to walk a thin line between proposing effec-tive improvements and supporting policies advanced by the Left, which usuallyoffended the DVP’s liberal distaste for massive state intervention. This becomesclear in the stands of the DVP’s expert on housing and urban development, DorisHertwig-Bünger, who sat in the Saxon Landtag and later in the Reichstag.Hertwig-Bünger stressed repeatedly that state incentives for the building ofapartments were a basic form of support for families with many children. Whenthe Communists presented a Reichstag bill supportive of these goals, however,Hertwig-Bünger opposed it because she found in it too much emphasis on statecontrol, excessively permissive provisions regarding abortion, and unrealisticfinancial demands.14 Minimizing state control over family life was a concernalso when the DVP women opposed a Communist bill for the establishment ofmandatory Kindergartens for all children at least three years of age.15

Whereas eugenic arguments played an important role in the controversies overreproduction during the Weimar Republic, particularly on the Left, DVP womenonly marginally participated in that debate.16 Bernays’ reference to the plight of

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the middle class in her speech on the decline of the birthrate makes it clear thatDVP women thought primarily of increasing the family size of the middleclasses, which tended to have a lower birthrate than the working class (althoughthe birthrate was declining across the board). But this class bias was rarelyspelled out; generally DVP women restricted themselves to pushing for a genericincrease of the population through fiscal and social measures. Szagunn agreedon the need to include eugenic perspectives in the abortion debate but did notpush that argument.17 That eugenics and abortion found little resonance amongDVP women may also have been because the Communists and SPD took theinitiative in these fields for much of the Weimar Republic. At the DVP women’snational conference in May 1929, for example, Broekelschen-Kemper warnedthat state-supported information agencies on family questions could be used todisseminate left-wing ideas on reproduction and to hand out contraceptivedevices. This warning reflected the typical distrust all right-wing women felttoward the SPD-led Prussian government, which was doing pioneering work inits centers for eugenic advice.18

The DNVP women took similar stands to DVP women on family and repro-duction but tended to stress their conservative and religious views more and weremuch more likely than DVP women to place their concerns into a racial context.The DNVP guidelines for women’s work in the party articulate clearly the reli-gious foundation of the DNVP women’s family policies: “The GermanNationalist woman sees in the Christian family the basis of a prospering peopleand state and thus stands primarily for the safeguarding of Christian marriageand for Christian childrearing … All measures beneficial to the foundation offamilies and providing relief to families with many children are to be supportedenergetically.”19 In all parliaments, the DNVP acted accordingly. In theReichstag, it pushed successfully for an increase in the unemployment benefitsfor workers with families in 1924.20 In the Prussian Landtag, Elisabeth Spohrand Ilse-Charlotte Noack demanded priority for large families in the distributionof apartments and land by the state of Prussia, and their colleague ThereseDeutsch pushed for greater benefits for these families as well: “The state has toshow clearly that it regards these families as the sources of strength for thefuture.”21 Deutsch also demanded higher state funding for the National Leagueof Large Families (Reichsbund der Kinderreichen), with which the DNVPfostered close contacts. (The leader of this organization, Martha Storost, ran onthe DNVP ticket in Prussia in 1924 – though unsuccessfully.)22 Most DNVPwomen probably agreed with the comments of the DVP’s Broekelschen-Kemperon the low birthrate in France, although this argument would take a more explicitracist tone in the DNVP. A woman writing for the official DNVP yearbook for1920, for example, declared that the two-child family was a “Latin disease” indi-cating racial decline.23

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On abortion and divorce, the DNVP opposed liberalization together with theCenter Party. In a typical diatribe against abortion, Elisabeth Spohr argued thatthe thought of a person’s right to his or her body was “poison” poured out by thesame circles that had undermined the Germans’ will to demonstrate obedienceand service and thus caused Germany’s breakdown in 1918. Spohr claimed thatthe middle classes would sink into the proletariat all the faster if they limitedtheir fertility and that the unskilled worker would procreate so much that hewould soon represent the physical and mental “type” of the German. How a largenumber of children would economically benefit middle-class families, however,remained Spohr’s secret.24 With respect to divorce law, the DNVP womenemphasized the sanctity of marriage and praised self-control and self-disciplineas the best remedy for unhappy marriages, although many of them also pointedout the injustices to women contained in the existing law.25 On illegitimate chil-dren, DNVP women took the same position as DVP women, seeking to improvethe social situation of these children while denying them the same rights as“legitimate” children.26

The campaign of DNVP women for the family resorted much more readily tosimplified, paranoid, and racist images than did the rhetoric of DVP women.Often the women from the DNVP invoked the vision of social chaos in the SovietUnion and the fear that Poles and Russians, who had a much higher birthrate thanthe Germans, might soon overrun Germany. DNVP women thus connected thewidespread concern about the “bleeding border” in the east – the notion that thedrawing of the German-Polish border after 1918 had disadvantaged Germanyand was causing great suffering for the Germans on both sides – to the vision ofSlavs and Bolsheviks overwhelming a declining German people.27 At theDNVP’s national conference in Königsberg (East Prussia) in September 1927,Annagrete Lehmann argued that the dissolution of the family and the dechris-tianization of culture in Germany would lead to a situation similar to the one thatexisted in the Soviet Union: hundreds of thousands of abandoned children wouldroam through the cities and the countryside, divorce would be easily available,and the sexual license of young men would go unchecked.28 Often DNVPwomen implied that Communists, Social Democrats, and atheists all formed afifth column for the eastern menace in Germany. The RFA secretary HannahBrandt, for example, accused socialists of wanting to dissolve the family byestablishing communal Kindergartens and by upgrading the status of unmarriedcouples. She called this policy a “Bolshevization of German notions of customand morality.”29 When Lehmann spoke in the Reichstag against a Communistproposal for the liberalization of abortion, she argued that the decline of thebirthrate could only be ascribed to the rise of atheism that was killing thecommitment to having a child.30 In the Prussian Landtag, Dr. Helene von Watterargued in February 1929 that social legislation had failed to reverse the decline

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of the birthrate and that only “a different moral, ethical, and Christian attitude”could help. Watter alluded to the high birthrate in Russia and Poland when shewarned: “If our people fails to fundamentally change in this respect over thecoming years then we will soon be overgrown and overpopulated [überwuchertund übervölkert] by the other countries and states – and this without war or otherexternal events.”31 This mood reached fever pitch in the last years of the WeimarRepublic, when concern about a further decline of the birthrate due to the GreatDepression, and anxiety about the spread of atheistic movements from the SovietUnion to Germany, gripped many on the German right. The renewed attacks ofthe Stalin regime against the Churches in the Soviet Union and the growingstrength of the Communist Party in Germany further fueled these fears.32 Amemorandum written by DNVP women in February 1932 stated that theGermans would soon be a “dying people” because their governments had madethem bear too much economic hardship since 1918.33 In a sharp attack on thesocial policies of the German government, Reichstag deputy Magdalene vonTiling argued a few months later that the government had strengthened the trendtoward families with only one or two children. In 1950 the population ofGermany would therefore sharply decline, and the Germans would no longer bea “people without space” but would have to open themselves to the “inflow ofSlavic blood.”34 In the election campaigns of 1932, Annagrete Lehmann oftenconjured up the image of a final struggle between the national-Christian campand the international-atheistic “forces destructive of the family” associated withthe Slavs in Eastern Europe and the Communist Party in Germany.35

The racist connotations of these horror scenarios fit well with the racialhygienic ideas that came to dominate the thinking of some DNVP women onreproductive issues.36 The leading exponents of this trend among the DNVPwomen were the völkisch women’s activists, above all Käthe Schirmacher, IlseHamel, and Erna von Birkhahn, member of the RFA and chair of the DNVP’sprovincial women’s committee in Mecklenburg.37 They combined a commitmentto women’s rights with a racialized vision of the Volksgemeinschaft similar to theone promoted by leading Nazi theorists. In an article on “völkisch longing,” forexample, Erna von Birkhahn argued that a true Volksgemeinschaft could onlydevelop among people of the same race. Therefore, mixed-race marriages shouldbe discouraged and only “German-blooded people” (Deutschblütige) should beallowed to shape German culture and law.38 Whereas Birkhahn did not explicitlyrefer to Jews, Ilse Hamel argued that “a natural, unbridgeable antagonism” existsbetween Aryans and Jews. Believing that the Germanic woman would instinc-tively choose a partner with the same racial background, she accused Jews ofinterfering with that racial intuition through their corrupting cultural influence.Hamel concluded with an urgent call to all German mothers to instill in theirchildren the “horror of mixed marriages and the dangers of hybrid blood.”39

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Hamel repeatedly stressed that it was the task of the German woman tostrengthen the Nordic element of the population (Aufnordung), a point also madeby Schirmacher in speeches at the 1925 meeting of the DNVP’s VölkischCommittee and the national party conference in 1926.40 These ideas, propagatedby the völkisch women’s activists throughout the 1920s, became predominant inthe thinking of DNVP women after 1930 with the encouragement of RFA chairAnnagrete Lehmann.

Related to the concern about the family and the birthrate, issues regardingeducation and youth also figured prominently on the agenda of DVP and DNVPwomen. Given the strong representation of schoolteachers in the ranks of politi-cally active women, the interest of these women in school legislation and allaspects of youth comes as no surprise. In several regions, the women’s commit-tees of both parties inspired the creation and helped in the development of youthcommittees.41 Women from both parties considered youth concerns and educa-tion a central aspect of women’s activity, and they often hoped to create thelegislative framework for a new generation educated in a more patriotic and reli-gious spirit.42 Right-wing women agreed that German women should raise a newgeneration of more patriotic, self-sacrificing, and determined Germans. As theDNVP’s Klara Klotz, chair of the LFA Württemberg, put it before the DNVPwomen’s conference of September 1926: “Through us mothers, the family shouldbecome Germany’s psychological and mental arms factory.”43 For the DVP,Marie Bernays had already written in 1920 that instilling a nationalist attitude inchildren must become a universal mission of German schools: “We, the women,will always protest if critics argue that education toward a nationalist attitude istantamount to the political influencing of youth. We do not want the talk of toler-ance and the reconciliation of peoples to allow our children to forget that theirfathers died for our freedom.”44 The idea that women or mothers had the powerand duty to raise a new generation in a more nationalist spirit appearedfrequently in the deliberations of DVP women on foreign policy. The Reichstagdeputy Katharina Kardorff-von Oheimb, for example, spoke of children as a“sleeping army,” and Emma Stropp declared it a special duty of women to protestnational humiliation by considering the future of German children.45 Here was avital connection between women’s activities in education and morality and theirnationalism. Believing that Germany’s defeat in 1918 had been in part anoutcome of moral weakness already manifest before 1914, right-wing womenwanted to strengthen the moral fiber of the nation by working for a more nation-alist and authoritarian education. While emphasizing this connection, right-wingwomen also made a point for the national importance of their primary fields ofinterest, often belittled by men.

In their statements about youth, women from the DNVP and, to a lesser degree,the DVP often revealed a patronizing and authoritarian pedagogy, as exemplified

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by the Martin Luther statement quoted in a DNVP pamphlet: “The apple has tolie next to the whip.”46 Women from both parties agreed that the lowering of thevoting age from twenty-five to twenty in 1919 was a mistake. In the NationalAssembly, Margarethe Behm spoke against this reform in an amused atmosphere:“The male youth, in particular, is real cider in this age group, (very good! On theright) it can turn into beautiful wine, better than the one we get nowadays,(laughter and approval) but it still is only cider, (very true! On the right) and wehave to wish that it turns only into the most noble wine.”47 Occasionally DVP andDNVP women admitted their fears that the lower voting age benefited mostly theextremist parties, but they always justified a higher voting age on pedagogicalgrounds.48 Tiling often stressed that the young person, particularly the girl, shouldnot be confronted with too many adult matters. At an RFA meeting in 1928,Lehmann gave this argument a racist twist by arguing that the Nordic girl had thetendency to mature more slowly than others but that Jewish influence in pedagogywas forcing her to confront sexual matters earlier than would be natural for her.49

But the raising of the voting age, although demanded by the programs of bothparties, was hard to effect. The biggest debates on youth and education thusfocused on other matters, particularly the school system.

The Weimar Constitution stated that three types of school should exist:common schools for children of all religious denominations, religious schoolswhere the teachers and the majority of students would belong to the samedenomination, and secular schools without any religious orientation. The firsttype of school received a preferential position, but the Constitution left thespecifics to be defined by the Reichstag in a national school law. The Reichstagdebated the issue repeatedly in the early 1920s, but only in 1927 did the govern-ment present a bill that seemed to have a chance to pass. The DNVP’s InteriorMinister Walter von Keudell had presided over the drafting of the bill; the schoolexperts Elsa Matz from the DVP and Ulrike Scheidel from the DNVP wereinvolved in the committee deliberations, and Prussian Landtag deputyMagdalene von Tiling had been consulted as well.50 The National School Bill,supported by the Center Party, the BVP, and the DNVP, proposed to abolish thepreferential treatment of the common school and to provide for an easier trans-formation of common schools into denominational schools according to the wishof parents. The bill was debated from October 1927 to February 1928. The left-wing parties and the Democratic Party opposed it because they claimed that itgave an advantage to denominational schools. Decisive was the fact that the DVP,which was at this time seeking to reaffirm its liberal principles, dragged its feet.When the Center Party proved unwilling to compromise on some DVP demandsfor revision that would have allowed the DVP to save its liberal face, the coali-tion government of DVP, Center Party, and DNVP broke apart and negotiationson the bill collapsed.51

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The DVP women watched the fate of the National School Bill with ambiva-lence. Given that Matz and other DVP women were well-connected to theEvangelical Church, the improved position of religious schools cannot haveoffended them. In fact, they had repeatedly demanded better protection fordenominational schools. Margarethe Detmering, a DVP representative in theLandtag of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, had even managed to push the Landtag toincrease the amount of religious instruction in public schools from two to threehours a week.52 When the National School Bill was published, Clara Mendewelcomed it and offered criticism only of some details.53 Yet, the DVP women’spress remained remarkably silent over the following months. Probably Matz andher colleagues decided to follow the more critical party line. After the collapseof the government, the DVP women again addressed the bill in public, but mostlyin order to deny the polemical charge from the Center and DNVP that the DVPhad caused the collapse because it wanted to ban religion from the schools.54 TheDNVP was outraged after the failure of the bill, most of all Magdalene vonTiling. As a prolific author of pedagogical works, Tiling had published apamphlet on the National School Bill, which she regarded to some extent as herpersonal cause, even though she was not (yet) in the Reichstag.55 Tiling and otherDNVP women had always defended the influence of religion in the schools andthe value of denominational schools. They resented the fact that the spirit ofChristianity did not have to permeate all classes in the privileged commonschools, although these schools did offer religion lessons.

That some common schools had been transformed into secular schools angeredthe DNVP women particularly. They kept a watchful eye over developments atthese schools, mostly in Berlin, and brought to nationwide attention what theyconsidered their most glaring abuses. In early 1924, for example, the DNVPclaimed that some secular schools in Berlin had allowed students of both sexes toperform naked dances. Gertrud Becker, a DNVP deputy in the Berlin city parlia-ment, publicized the story and demanded legal measures to prevent a recurrenceof this event. The DNVP even brought the issue before the Landtag and used it inits campaign for the May 1924 Reichstag elections.56 In 1926, the DNVP womenprotested against the appointment of an atheistic school councillor as head of theschools of Dortmund. This appointment provoked angry reactions from Christianparents, who even initiated a “school strike” by refusing to send their children toschool. A male Prussian Landtag deputy from the DNVP argued that it was ascandal that religious schools should be put under the supervision of somebodywho “considers the truths of the Christian religion mistakes.”57 In 1928, HannahBrandt, the secretary of the RFA, exposed one secular school in Berlin after itdistributed communist song books to its students, and another after its studentswere required to sing the Communist International while marching.58 In the sameyear Lehmann attacked a new Prussian government decree stating that students in

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state schools had to sing republican songs and to receive instruction on the Leagueof Nations, which Germany had joined in 1926. This contradicted the DNVP’sdemand – advanced also by DVP women – that instruction on the Treaty ofVersailles and the “war-guilt lie” be made mandatory at all schools.59 Frequentlythe DNVP women played on anti-Semitic stereotypes by pointing out that someof the school officials presiding over the Berlin schools were Jewish. GertrudBecker in 1924 depicted Jews as the seducers of German youth by insinuating thatJews had inspired the naked dances. Berlin’s school councillor Dr. KurtLöwenstein became the target of special resentment from DNVP women becauseof his Jewish background: as early as 1920, a speaker at a DNVP women’s confer-ence in Königsberg exclaimed: “It is outrageous that the government dares tooffer us a Dr. Löwenstein as supreme school councillor.”60 Memory of theperceived outrages at secular schools loomed large when DNVP women enthusi-astically welcomed the illegal overthrow of the SPD-led caretaker Prussiangovernment by Chancellor Franz von Papen on 20 July 1932.61

Whereas the DVP women stayed aloof from the DNVP women’s struggleagainst the secular schools, women from both parties agreed on the defense ofprivate education against the encroachments of the state, while also demandingstate support for these schools. Private girls’ schools, in particular, receivedmuch attention from them. Many of these schools had been built up by charis-matic women before 1914. The DVP women often stressed the pedagogical valueof the girls’ schools and argued that coeducational schools tended to make girlsfeel more apprehensive and shy than single-sex institutions. The DVP schoolexpert Dr. Marie Bernays, herself the director of a girls’ school, argued that suchinstitutions were more flexible and innovative than the state schools and moreinspired by the spirit of morality. Bernays also pointed out that these schoolswere crucial for girls because the teachers were mostly women. Elsa Matz, whowas the director of a girls’ school in Stettin (Pomerania), made the same argu-ment several times in the first Reichstag (1920–24), and Dr. Gertraud Wolfrepeated it in the Bavarian Landtag. Margarethe Poehlmann, who had founded agirls’ school in Tilsit (Russia – after 1918: Lithuania) before the war, representedthe interests of girls’ schools in the Prussian Landtag until her death in December1923.62 But with all the stress on the need for a different curriculum for girls, theDVP women also demanded that the degree of the girls’ schools must be equiv-alent to the degree from the mainstream Realschule.63 They therefore combinedthe argument for essential difference between the sexes with a claim for equalopportunities.

The DNVP women saw the girls’ school primarily as a threatened space whereGerman girls still received a reliable national and Christian education – far fromthe allegedly internationalist and hyper-intellectual training that girls received inthe state schools. Tiling argued that girls’ schools should continue to emphasize

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subjects that related to Germany’s cultural heritage and to religious ethics.Together with other DNVP women, she often stressed that the girls’ schoolshould offer a different curriculum from that of coeducational or boys’ schoolsbecause girls suffered from an overly intellectualized curriculum.64 DNVPwomen thereby put less emphasis on equal opportunities than their DVPcolleagues, but women from both parties were in complete agreement that thefaculty of girls’ schools should consist mostly of women and that women should,as a rule, be their directors. They fought several changes of state regulations thatthreatened to reduce the number of women teachers in the girls’ schools.65

In connection with youth and education, women from the two partiesfrequently raised public-health issues, particularly the dangers of alcohol abuse.The physical damage alcohol inflicted on young people was seen as a threat tothe future viability of the Volk.66 In the Reichstag, Mueller-Otfried attacked thegovernment in 1921 for doing too little to combat alcohol abuse: “How muchlonger will the patience of those people be strained who do no longer want to seeour people’s potential and its force squandered by increasing alcohol abuse?”67

Therese Deutsch, as DNVP deputy in the Prussian Landtag, suggested that trainstations should promote the sale of milk and reduce the sale of alcoholic bever-ages, and Elisabeth Spohr, also in the Prussian Landtag, sharply criticized theGerman government for permitting advertisements for alcoholic beverages onthe national railroad. 68 Spohr called for a broad information campaign on themodel of American temperance campaigns. Like many other political women,she believed that the fight against alcohol abuse was a special cause of women:“We, the women, are looking for positive tasks that contribute to the rebuildingof the people (Volksaufbau). Here is a task where women have to participate withspecial energy.” Spohr also hit a note frequently used by women from the DVPand DNVP when she deplored the waste of sugar, fruit, and other nutrients in theproduction of alcoholic beverages.69 A special concern about alcohol abuse inpublic was raised by Klara Klotz, the DNVP’s only female legislator in theLandtag of Württemberg, during the Ruhr Occupation in 1923: “In this deadlyserious time of suffering – and out of respect for the heroic Ruhr population andits horrible suffering – our public life has to become pure and German again.”70

The women of the DVP also made temperance a central element of their poli-cies regarding families and youth.71 In the Prussian Landtag, MargarethePoehlmann demanded more protection for young people against the dangers ofalcohol and smoking, and Gertraud Wolf voiced similar concerns in the BavarianLandtag.72 In 1928 Wolf published an article with the title “More Milk!”describing Bavarian projects to propagate the health benefits of milk consump-tion and to accustom young people to drinking milk regularly; the call mehrMilch! may have reminded educated Germans of the motto mehr Licht! (morelight!) – Goethe’s often quoted last words.73 Wolf and other women also pushed

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for a revision of laws that considered drunkenness an extenuating circum-stance.74 To rein in alcohol abuse, women from the two parties demanded orsupported a variety of measures. They asked the state to become more active inalcohol-awareness education, to limit or ban the sale of alcoholic beverages toyoung people, to raise taxes on alcohol consumption, and to restrict the adver-tising of alcoholic beverages. The temperance struggle had a long tradition in theGerman and international women’s movement, and women from the DVP andDNVP here advanced nearly identical proposals that were frequently supportedby women from the Democratic Party and other parties as well, though with littlesuccess, given the opposition of the beer and wine lobby connected to male legis-lators on the right. Women from both parties watched with interest the enactmentof prohibition legislation in the United States, but they usually doubted that full-scale prohibition would be possible in Germany and worried about its effects inAmerica. After Clara Mende had visited the Washington conference of theInternational Council of Women in 1925, she argued that prohibition legislationin the United States had led to a lowering of morals and an increase of alcoholconsumption among young people, particularly girls.75

Whereas the alcohol issue concerned mostly the prevention of a physical andmoral danger to youth, women legislators were also active in promoting meas-ures to enhance the health of the people, in particular the young. More than themen in their parties, women of the DVP and DNVP encouraged sports. Althoughgymnastics had a long and honored tradition in Germany beginning with theexercises of “Vater” Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in the aftermath of the liberationwars against Napoleon, most schools still lacked facilities and a commitment tophysical education in the 1920s.76 Matz repeatedly assured the Reichstag thatsupporting sports was meant more to benefit the people’s health and moralitythan to encourage the pursuit of top-performance sports and the “Schmelinghype” – the wave of national excitement created by the exploits of boxing starMax Schmeling. Yet she did point out to the Reichstag that German successes atthe Olympic Games of 1928 had enhanced Germany’s reputation abroad – partic-ularly “considering the friendliness toward sports in the Anglo-Saxon countries”– and thus demanded more state support for the German Olympic team.77 In aparadigmatic statement, Matz explained to the Reichstag in 1928 that exercisestrengthened the will and self-control of young people while making them lesssusceptible to “those pleasures that tend to destroy the body and the spirit.”Obviously, her remarks provoked some smiling among men in the Reichstag, towhich she reacted with the following words: “I know very well that my talkingabout these things does not cause general happiness in the Reichstag, but I wantto stress that a little more personal experience with gymnastics and sports woulddo many of the members of this high house no harm.”78 In the DNVP, severalwomen in the Prussian Landtag took up similar causes. Therese Deutsch asked

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the state to support youth hiking by funding the network of youth hostels that wasbeing built up on the initiative of General Rüdiger von der Goltz.79 FreifrauHelene von Watter, also a DNVP Landtag deputy, was on the board of theGerman Gymnastics League (Deutsche Turnerschaft) and demanded in thePrussian Landtag that sports be emphasized more because they helped Germans“to preserve their last good, their genetic heritage.”80 Beate Bartels argued in theDNVP’s Frauenkorrespondenz that sports lessons in school had to stress char-acter formation and not “American striving for records.” Otherwise, she argued,the school would stir up ambition and arrogance, which Bartels considered twiceas obnoxious in girls as in boys.81

Directly related to youth issues was the women’s concern over public morality.This theme played a key role in the work of women legislators and activists fromboth parties. The absence of many fathers and the increasing problems of policingthe home front had already created a widespread sense of alarm among educatorsduring the First World War. Later, the upheavals of the postwar period appearedto prevent the restoration of the protective environment that youth deserved, as theWeimar Republic seemed to have given free rein to public displays of vice. Imagesof neglected, aggressive, and hedonistic youngsters abounded. A contributor tothe DVP-Nachrichtenblatt, for example, claimed in 1920 that young people spentall their money on beer and cigarettes and had to be taught respect for spiritualwork, a task that only women’s educational influence could achieve.82 One of thekey points of the DNVP women’s program of 1921 was the fight against publicdisplays of immorality – against the proliferation of “trash and dirt” in literature,film, and theater.83 Women from almost all parties in the Reichstag agreed on theneed for restrictive legislation, although they differed on how much control andcensorship could pass before fundamental freedoms were violated. In August1925, the DNVP’s Interior Minister Martin Schiele proposed a bill to theReichstag to tighten censorship rules and to establish a reviewing board chargedwith identifying publications containing dangers for youth. Reichstag membersElsa Matz from the DVP as well as Ulrike Scheidel and Paula Mueller-Otfriedfrom the DNVP helped to draft the bill and to promote it afterwards. The bill wasdebated for over a year and became law on 18 December 1926 with the supportof the DVP, DNVP, and the Center Party, serving, in the words of historianCornelie Usborne, as “a reminder of the importance of conservative forces amidstthe social revolution of the ‘roaring twenties’.”84

Typical for right-wing women, an author in the Frauenkorrespondenz in early1926 justified the bill and demanded that women play a central role in its imple-mentation. “It [the bill] calls for women who are ready to fight with theirmaternal feeling for women’s dignity.” She claimed that women had a particularrole in fighting public immorality because they had a more refined sense ofshame and were more likely than men to be denigrated by immoral literary or

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artistic products.85 After the passage of the bill, Elsa Matz was appointed to thehighest national control committee on film (Filmoberprüfstelle). How inclusiveher definition of immorality and danger to youth was became clear when shejustified the banning of the anti-war film “All Quiet on the Western Front” in late1930, blaming the film for damaging German prestige abroad, offendingveterans, and provoking unrest.86 Whereas DNVP women had no problem withcensorship, DVP women occasionally saw the need to justify their positions inthis field in front of the men in their party. Matz admitted that, against heradvice, the majority of the DVP Reichstag group had voted against the ban of“All Quiet on the Western Front.” Therefore, Prussian Landtag deputy Anny vonKulesza took pains to explain to the DVP’s national conference in 1930 that thestruggle against public displays of immorality did not contradict liberal princi-ples, even though she advocated such illiberal positions as censorship and theemployment of religious persons as teachers.87

In the context of public morality, prostitution was an important topic becauseit revealed a double standard of morality for men and women and because mostbourgeois women considered it a great danger to the health of the Volk throughits role in the spread of venereal disease. Already before the First World War, theGerman women’s movement had attacked the arbitrary control and regulation ofprostitutes by the police as an injustice that rested on double standards ofmorality.88 After the war, this claim was revived in the context of concern overvenereal diseases that were believed to have spread dramatically during thewar.89 DVP and DNVP women argued that police regulation provided a falsesense of security against the spread of venereal disease because the vast majorityof prostitutes were “wild,” meaning unregistered, practitioners of their trade.Women from both parties urged lawmakers to rein in prostitution in general andthus to prevent the spread of venereal disease. They also criticized the inconsis-tent state policy that declared prostitution illegal while helping to organize it. In1927, the Reichstag finally abolished police regulation and decriminalized pros-titution through the Law on the Struggle Against Venereal Disease. Women fromboth parties welcomed the change, but the DNVP commentator, Reichstagmember Ulrike Scheidel, demanded that the new law be followed up by a lawallowing the police to take some prostitutes into custody. Scheidel argued thatthree out of four prostitutes were mentally disturbed and should be sent to ruralwork colonies.90 Women from both parties also pressed hard for bans on theemployment of young women in bars that used the sexual appeal of these womento lure male customers and to increase their alcohol consumption(Animierkneipen). The National Assembly passed a law restricting this abuse inDecember 1919, and when the Prussian Landtag in 1921 deliberated a law on theemployment of women in the hotel and restaurant sector, Margarethe Poehlmannand Lotte Garnich of the DVP as well as Elisabeth Spohr and Ilse-Charlotte

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Noack of the DNVP demanded a complete ban of the Animierkneipen in Prussia– but to no avail.91

In general, women from the DVP and DNVP pursued similar policies withrespect to family, youth, and morality, with the former being occasionally a littlemore liberal (divorce, abortion) and the latter more religious and raciallyoriented. With respect to these issues, the DNVP and often the DVP thusbelonged to the “moral” or “religious” Right and cooperated with the CenterParty and the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP).92 Women from both parties hadimportant connections to the Evangelical Church and to prestigious maleReichstag members associated with it: Wilhelm Kahl in the DVP and ReinhardMumm in the DNVP.93 The racist element in the DNVP women’s discourse onthe birthrate, health, and morality shows that some DNVP women alreadythought of the Volksgemeinschaft in strictly racial terms, but this thinking had noobvious equivalent in the DVP. Yet all the policies adopted by women from bothparties were consistent in their aim to strengthen morally and physically a nationweakened by the effects of war and economic crisis. Their efforts to strengthenthe family, increase the birthrate, and fight amorality in education and publicdisplays aimed at making the German people united and strong. This meant tostem a widely perceived decline but could also be seen as a preparation of theVolkskörper for a new war in which a “healthy”, purged Germany would dobetter than it had in 1914–1918. Klotz’s reference to mothers as Germany’s“arms factory” points in that direction.

Notes

1. Bericht über den Zweiten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 18., 19. u.20. Oktober 1919, pp. 177–8. Emphasis in the original.

2. Boak, “Women in Weimar Politics”, p. 379 (calls social and cultural policiesa “not very prestigious area”); Koonz, “Conflicting Allegiances,” pp. 671–4(stresses the division of political concerns of legislators along sex lines).One should point out, however, that some of these spheres, such as welfare,occupied center stage in Weimar politics.

3. DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1924, Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1924, p. 493.4. For examples see “Grundsätze deutschnationaler Frauenarbeit,” as quoted in

Annagrete Lehmann, “Ziel und Entwicklung der deutschnationalenFrauenarbeit.” In Max Weiß, ed., Der nationale Wille (Essen: WilhelmKamp, 1928), pp. 326 and 328, and DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1924, p. 496.

5. Bericht über den Zweiten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 18., 19. u.20. Oktober 1919, pp. 177–8.

6. DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1928. Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1928, pp. 425and 428. See also Helene Fock, “Bevölkerungsbewegung und Steuer-

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politik,” NLC 52, no. 189, 14 October 1925 (FR 35), and M. S. [MarthaSchwarz], “Probleme der Bevölkerungspolitik,” NLC 56, no. 218, 30October 1929 (FR 35).

7. Elsa Matz, “Familienschutz und Steuerpolitik,” NLC 52, no. 223, 30November 1925. See also her Reichstag speech, in VdR, 1924–1928, vol.388, pp. 4938–9. For background, see Atina Grossman, Reforming Sex (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 3, and Usborne, The Politics of theBody in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992),pp. 166–73.

8. VdR, 1924–1928, vol. 392, pp. 9697–8.9. Broekelschen-Kemper, “Probleme des Geburtenrückgangs,” NLC 56, no.

104, 22 May 1929.10. See the report of the DVP women’s meeting during the national party

conference in Nürnberg in December 1920: “Die Reichsfrauentagung inNürnberg,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 48/49, 9 December 1920. See alsoAnna Mayer, “Der neue Gesetzentwurf über die Rechtstellung der unehe-lichen Kinder und die Annahme an Kindesstatt,” NLC 56, no. 27, 6 February1929.

11. Ilse Szagunn, “Paragraph 218,” NLC 51, no. 132, 12 August 1924.12. Usborne, Politics of the Body; p. 172; Grossman, Reforming Sex, pp. 82–3.13. Clara Mende, “Zur Reform der Ehescheidung,” NLC 53, no. 62, 8 April

1926. See also DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 15, 20 July 1923, and“Fortbildungskurs für Frauen in Neuruppin,” Berliner Stimmen 4, no. 6,June 1927. On religious opposition to the reform of family law, see Usborne,Politics of the Body, p. 92.

14. VdR, 1928–1930, vol. 424, pp. 1331 and 1788–9; vol. 426, pp. 3610–12; andvol. 428, pp. 5994–6.

15. DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1928, pp. 428–9.16. Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain,

1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” German Studies Review XXIII,no. 3 (2000): 477–505 (here pp. 489–94).

17. Ilse Szagunn, “Paragraph 218,” NLC 51, no. 132, 12 August 1924. Szagunn,however, supported the eugenic policies of the Nazi Regime in 1934. SeeGrossman, Reforming Sex, p. 155.

18. Else Frobenius, “Mitarbeit der Frau an der Politik. Reichsfrauentagung derDeutschen Volkspartei in Bremen,” Berliner Stimmen 6, no. 20, 18 May1929. See also Usborne, The Politics of the Body, pp. 72 and 172.

19. “Grundsätze deutschnationaler Frauenarbeit,” as quoted in Lehmann, “Zielund Entwicklung der deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” p. 326.

20. Maria Schott, “Die weibliche Jugend und die Erwerbslosenfürsorge,”Frauenkorrespondenz 5, no. 29, 23 July 1924.

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21. Frauenkorrespondenz 4, no. 3, 7 March 1923;VdL, 1928–32, vol. III, pp.4091–2. See also RFA, “Fürsorge für kinderreiche Familien,” Frauen-korrespondenz 5, no. 45, 12 November 1924.

22. For the DNVP’s contacts with the Bund der Kinderreichen, see for exampleLenore Kühn, “Der Bund der Kinderreichen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no.26, 4 October 1922, and the list of DNVP candidates in Frauen-korrespondenz 6, no. 46, 26 November 1924.

23. Emma Föllmer, “Die nationale Frau,” Jahrbuch 1920 der DeutschnationalenVolkspartei. Berlin: Schriftenvertrieb der Dn. Vp.: [1920], in BA Koblenz,ZSg. 1–44 (DNVP), vol. 4 (2).

24. Else von Sperber, “Zur Ehescheidungsreform,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no.3, 20 January 1927; Elisabeth Spohr, “Volkserstarkung oder Untergang,”Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 28, 16 July 1924.

25. Freda von Rechenberg, “Gefährdung der Eheauffassung,” Frauen-korrespondenz 10, no. 11, 22 March 1928; Else Meyer, “Jugendnot und Ehereform,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 48, 29 November 1928.

26. “Die Stellung des unehelichen Kindes,” Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 9, 21January 1922; see also “Deutschnationale Frauenpolitik: Richtlinien derDeutschnationalen Volkspartei für Frauenfragen,” in Jahrbuch 1921 derDeutschnationalen Volkspartei. Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriften-vertriebsstelle [1920], p. 30.

27. On women’s concern over Germany’s border with Poland, see ElizabethHarvey, “Pilgrimages to the ‘Bleeding Border’: Gender and Rituals ofNationalist Protest in Germany, 1919–1939.” Women’s History Review 9, no.2 (2000): 201–29, which does not, however, mention the fear of the highbirthrate in Poland and the Soviet Union, which was a crucial aspect ofDNVP women’s thinking about the border.

28. Summary of Lehmann’s speech: “Die Frauenversammlung auf demDeutschnationalen Reichsparteitag in Königsberg,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9,no. 38, 22 September 1927.

29. “Der Kampf um die deutsche Familie,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 16, 19April 1928. See also Asta Rötger, “Neugestaltung oder Vernichtung,”Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 52, 24 December 1930.

30. VdR, 1928–30, vol. 424, p. 1330.31. VdL, 1928–32, vol. III, pp. 3956–7.32. Lange, Protestantische Frauen auf dem Weg in den Nationalsozialismus, p.

170; Kurt Nowak, Evangelische Kirche und Weimarer Republik(1918–1932) (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1981), p. 313.

33. Lindequist, “Warum sind wir deutschnational?” Die Deutschnationale Frau14, no. 4, 16 February 1932.

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34. Magdalene von Tiling, “Kulturfragen,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no.11, 1 June 1932.

35. See for example Annagrete Lehmann, “Deutsche Frauen, Volk und Staatrufen Euch!” Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 13, 1 July 1932.

36. Whereas eugenics – the theory on how to raise the genetic quality of theoffspring – was generally pursued outside a racist framework (andfrequently by the Left), racial hygiene often tended to build eugenic princi-ples into a ranking of races by genetic value. See Paul Weindling, Health,Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism,1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 135–8, andRobert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), particularly chapter 1.

37. See Christiane Streubel, “‘Eine wahrhaft nationale Frauenbewegung’:Völkisch-Nationale Feministinnen in der Weimarer Republik.” In EvaSchoeck-Quinteros and Christiane Streubel, eds., Frauen der politischenRechten 1890–1933: Aktionen – Organisationen – Ideologien (Berlin:Trafo-Verlag, in print). I prefer to call these women “völkisch women’sactivists” rather than “völkisch feminists,” “national feminists,” or “opposi-tional fascists,” as they are called in other sources. They were not feministsin the sense of being interested in advancing universal women’s rights, andtheir idea of women’s rights implied not much individual freedom (seebelow, p. 173). “National feminists” is also misleading insofar as mostwomen promoting women’s rights would have cringed at the thought ofbeing excluded from the label “national.” The term “oppositional fascists”makes sense only in the light of these women’s opposition to right-wingmen’s mysogyny.

38. Erna von Birkhahn, “Völkisches Sehnen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 11,2 February 1924.

39. Ilse Hamel, “Völkische Mütter – starkes Volk,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no.12, 16 February 1924.

40. Ilse Hamel, “Völkisch als Rassebegriff,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 26, 2July 1924; Käthe Schirmacher, “Frankreichs farbige Truppen,” Frauen-korrespondenz 7, no. 51, 13 July 1925; and Schirmacher, “Die SchwarzeSchmach,” Bundesarchiv Koblenz, ZSg. 1–44 (DNVP), vol. 3.

41. See the organizational news in the first two volumes of Der Parteifreund.Amtliches Blatt der deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Landesverband Ost-preußen; Elisabeth Lürßen, “Die weibliche Jugend in den Jugendgruppender D. Vp.,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 1, no. 4, 26 October 1919. For thestrength of the teaching profession among women legislators, see Koonz,“Conflicting Allegiances,” p. 669.

42. Marie Bernays, “Eindrücke der Tagung des Vereins Frauenbildung-

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Frauenstudium in Heidelberg vom 15. bis 17. Juli,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt2, no. 30, 29 July 1920.

43. “Unsere Familie soll durch uns Mütter die seelische und geistigeWaffenschmiede Deutschlands werden!” in “Deutschnationale Frauentagungin Köln,” Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 37, 9 September 1926.

44. Marie Bernays, “Eindrücke der Tagung des Vereins Frauenbildung-Frauenstudium in Heidelberg vom 15. bis 17. Juli.”

45. Katharina von Oheimb, “Das schlafende Heer,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4,no. 2, 19 January 1923; Emma Stropp, “Das Auslieferungsverlangen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 7, 12 February 1920.

46. Die Frau in Familie und Staat, Deutschnationales Rüstzeug 7, Berlin:Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle, 1924, p. 16.

47. Verhandlungen der Nationalversammlung, vol. 327, p. 1266. See alsoReinhard Mumm, “Weibliche Beredsamkeit,” in Frauenkorrespondenz 2,no. 12, 12 March 1921.

48. On the DVP’s stand, see Marie Bernays, “Die weibliche Jugend und dieReichstagswahlen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 22, 3 June 1920.

49. “Weimarer Brief,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 6, 9 February 1928; forTilings’s argument, see VdL, 1924–1928, vol. XII, p. 18093.

50. See Magdalene von Tiling, Die christliche Frau und das Reichsschulgesetz,Aus Deutschlands Not und Ringen 2, Berlin: DeutschnationaleSchriftenvertriebsstelle, 1928, and Schneider-Ludorff, Magdalene vonTiling, pp. 86–8.

51. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System,1918–1933, pp. 295–7; Dennis Walker, “The German Nationalist People’sParty,” Journal of Contemporary History 14 (1979), pp. 629–30.

52. Die Frauen in der Politik der Deutschen Volkspartei, Flugschriften derDeutschen Volkspartei 53, Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1924, pp. 8–9.

53. Clara Mende, “Ein Berufsausbildungsgesetz,” NLC 54, no. 174, 4 October1927.

54. DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1928, p. 419.55. Tiling, Die christliche Frau und das Reichsschulgesetz; C.S., “Das

Reichsschulgesetz,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 35, 1 September 1927;“Sitzung des Erweiterten Frauenausschusses,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no.45, 10 November 1927 (with Tiling’s speech on the National School Bill).

56. Gertrud Becker, “Sittliche Gefährdung unserer Kinder,” Frauen-korrespondenz 6, no. 12, 16 February 1924; Annagrete Lehmann, “Frauen-welt und Wahlen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 11, 2 February 1924;Monatsmitteilungen für die Vertrauensmänner und Mitglieder derDeutschnationalen Volkspartei Kreisverein Soldin 6, no. 1, 31 January 1924;Frau Waschmeyer, “Rhytmisch-gymnastische Nacktübungen, Nationalpost

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6, no. 7, 17 February 1924; Die Frau in Familie und Staat, Deutsch-nationales Rüstzeug 7, Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle,1924, pp. 14–15. For the Landtag motion, see VdL, 1921–1924, vol. 13, p.7938.

57. RFA, “Der Schulkonflikt in Westfalen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 52, 23December 1926; RFA, “Der Kampf um die christliche Schule,”Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 50, 9 December 1926; Schneider-Ludorff,Magdalene von Tiling, pp. 69–70.

58. “Zustände an weltlichen Schulen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 17, 26April 1928.

59. Annagrete Lehmann, “Was steht am 20. Mai zur Entscheidung?”Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 16, 19 April 1928. For the DVP position, seeDie Frauen in der Politik der Deutschen Volkspartei, Flugschriften derDeutschen Volkspartei 53, Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1924, pp. 6–7.

60. “Frauenversammlung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” Der Partei-freund. Amtliches Blatt der deutschnationalen Volkspartei, LandesverbandOstpreußen 1, no. 25, 28 October 1920. See also Mitteilungen desDeutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest” 16, no. 13, 1 October1920.

61. See Ilse Hamel, “Rückkehr zu deutscher Sitte und Art,” DeutschnationaleFrau 14, no. 17, 1 September 1932; Annagrete Lehmann, “Überwindung derRevolution?” Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 15, 31 July 1932.

62. Marie Bernays, “Das Schicksal der privaten Mädchenschulen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 15, 15 April 1920. For Matz’s speeches, see VdR,1920–1924, vol. 345, p. 1111, and vol. 354, p. 6948; Milka Fritsch,“Margarethe Poehlmann† Was sie uns gewesen ist!” NLC 51, no. 13, 21January 1924. On Wolf, see DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 8, 13 April 1923.For a summary biography of Bernays, see Ira Hochreuther, Frauen imParlament: südwestdeutsche Abgeordnete seit 1919 (Stuttgart: TheissVerlag, 1992), pp. 54–5.

63. See for example Die Frauen in der Politik der Deutschen Volkspartei, p. 11.64. Magdalene von Tiling, “Mädchenschulfragen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no.

20, 9 July 1921; Magdalene von Tiling, Wir Frauen und die christlicheSchule (Berlin: Vaterländische Verlags- und Kunstanstalt, 1928). See alsoVdL, 1924–28, vol. XII, pp. 18091–6.

65. See for example “Die Deutschnationalen und das Mädchenschulwesen,”Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 14, 6 March 1920 (discussing a proposalregarding girls’ schools made by Spohr in the Prussian Landtag);“Frauenfragen im Hauptausschuß des Preußischen Landtages,” NLC 51, no.151, 12 September 1924; “Forderungen zur Mädchenschulbildung,” NLC52, no. 154, 24 August 1925.

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66. VdL, Landesversammlung 1919–1921, vol. XI, pp. 14163–70 (Poehlmann).67. VdR, 1920–1924, vol. 357, pp. 9211–12.68. VdL, 1928–1932, vol. III, p. 4092; Elisabeth Spohr, “Die Alkoholfrage,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 37, 17 September 1924.69. Elisabeth Spohr, “Die Alkoholfrage,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 37, 17

September 1924.70. Klara Klotz, “Aus meiner Landtagsarbeit,” Frauenkorrespondenz 5,

no. 11, 19 September 1923. For a summary biography of Klotz, seeHochreuther, Frauen im Parlament: südwestdeutsche Abgeordnete seit 1919,pp. 80–1.

71. “Familie und Wahlen,” NLC 51, no. 67, 2 May 1924.72. Margarethe Poehlmann, “Sozialpolitische Fragen im Preußischen Landtag,”

DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 21, 26 May 1921, and DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4,no. 7, 30 March 1923 (on Wolf).

73. Gertraud Wolf, “Mehr Milch!” NLC 55, no. 49, 15 March 1928.74. See, for example, Gertraud Wolf’s initiative in the Bavarian Landtag in

March 1923: DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 7, 30 March 1923.75. Clara Mende, “Amerikanisches über den Alkohol,” NLC 52, no. 123, 8 July

1925.76. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Band 2: Von der

Reformära bis zur industriellen und politischen “Deutschen Doppel-revolution”: 1815–1848/49. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1987, pp. 333–5.

77. VdR, 1928–30, vol. 428, p. 5591, and VdR, 1930–32, vol. 445, p. 1419.78. VdR, 1928–30, vol. 425, pp. 2296–7.79. VdL, 1928–1932, vol. III, p. 4092.80. “Die Frau in der Deutschen Turnerschaft,” NLC 55, no. 168, 26 September

1928.81. Beate Bartels, “Mädchensport,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 40, 6 October

1927.82. Ella Mensch, “Die Erhalterin von Werten,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 31,

5 August 1920.83. “Deutschnationale Frauenpolitik. Richtlinien der Deutschnationalen

Volkspartei für Frauenfragen,” p. 30.84. Usborne, Politics of the Body, p. 77. For context, see ibid., pp. 76–81, and

Margret F. Stieg, “The 1926 German Law to Protect Youth against Trash andDirt: Moral Protectionism in a Democracy.” Central European History 23(1990): 22–56 (here pp. 33–48).

85. Hildegard Ellenbeck, “Die Frau im Kampf gegen Schmutz und Schund,”Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 1, 5 January 1926.

86. Elsa Matz, “Endlich,” NLC 57, no. 242, 12 December 1930. Matz onlyregretted that her own committee had passed the film despite her objections.

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It was banned by the Reichstag later on – against the votes of most DVPdeputies.

87. 8. Reichsparteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Mannheim vom 21.bis 23. März 1930, Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1930, p. 6.

88. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, pp. 43–4; Frevert, Women inGerman History, p. 135. See also “Deutschnationale Frauenpolitik:Richtlinien der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei für Frauenfragen,” p. 30.

89. Usborne, The Politics of the Body, p. 109.90. “Die Gefährdetenfürsorge nach dem Reichsgesetz zur Bekämpfung der

Geschlechtskrankheiten und den preußischen Ausführungsbestimmungen,”NLC 55, no. 16, 26 January 1928; Ulrike Scheidel, “Das Gesetz zur Bekämp-fung der Geschlechtskrankheiten,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 4, 27January 1927.

91. VdL, Landesversammlung 1919–1921, vol. XI, pp. 14163–70 (Poehlmann),14850–2 (Spohr), 14855–6 (Garnich); “Rückblick,” Frauenkorrespondenz3, no. 3, 22 October 1921 (on Noack).

92. Usborne, Politics of the Body, pp. 72 and 76.93. Nowak, Evangelische Kirche und Weimarer Republik, pp. 24, 29, and 35–7.

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–6–

Small Rentiers

Aside from the loss of precious people and the terrible mutilations ofdisabled war veterans, the fate of small rentiers is particularly touchingamong the many worries and traumas that affected Germany as a conse-quence of the war and the revolution … After a life of sacrificing themselvesfor the public good, these old people are left with nothing and are defense-less against harsh poverty.

Paula Mueller-Otfried, 19281

One issue of social policy received consistent attention from women of bothparties: the plight of small rentiers. The women chose this issue as a centralfeature of their social policy because the small rentiers epitomized to them theplight of the middle classes and allowed them to put their maternalist policies inaction. That over two-thirds of the small rentiers were women was rarelymentioned because the DVP and DNVP women always sought to avoid givingthe impression that they were advancing particular women’s interests. By repre-senting the interests of small rentiers, the women also did a service to theirparties: the rentiers initially voted strongly for the DVP and DNVP, and womentried to keep them loyal to their parties at a time when the interests of big busi-ness and agriculture tended to win out over the demands of the rentiers. In theend, however, the women’s efforts merely delayed the small rentiers’ exodus tosplinter parties and the NSDAP.2

Small rentiers were a poorly defined middle-class group – estimates varybetween 200,000 and a million people – that depended on savings to pay for theirliving costs in old age or to supplement their pensions.3 The male members ofthis group had typically been officers, white-collar workers, or independentlyemployed small businessmen. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of thisgroup were women, however.4 They included widows of members of the formergroups and the so-called Haustöchter, women who had never married but hadinstead taken care of their parents or other family members on whose inheritancethey had hoped to survive in old age. The preponderance of women over men inthe small-rentier group resulted from women on average living longer than menand also from the fact that women generally had a harder time than men finding

– 107 –


employment to relieve their dependence on savings in old age. Moreover, manywomen had invested their wartime income in government war bonds.5

Devaluation and inflation, however, had by the end of 1923 destroyed the savingsof small rentiers and eroded their pension payments, if they ever had any. AReichstag law granting some relief to small rentiers was passed in February 1923but failed to stabilize their situation, and the revaluation legislation of early 1924,while promising some compensation payments, denied them the hoped-for resti-tution of their savings. Many rentiers thus became dependent on poor relief,which they found insufficient, degrading, and inconsistent. Poor relief wasadministered at the municipal level, and complaints abounded about the arbitraryway in which financially strained municipalities dealt with the claims ofrentiers.6

The small rentiers, represented by the German Rentiers’ League (DeutscherRentnerbund) with between 90,000 and 170,000 members, blamed the Weimarstate for their plight because they believed that its tax policies and its abandon-ment of the gold standard had ruined them. Therefore they demanded restitutionfrom the Reich – often exaggerating their prewar or pre-inflation wealth.Pointing out that they had saved for a lifetime for their retirement and had mademany investments in government or war bonds, they depicted themselves as apatriotic and civic-minded group distinct from those poor pensioners who hadnot owned any savings (Sozialrentner). Small pensioners often implied that theSozialrentner had been impoverished due to their own moral failure and not dueto misguided or evil state policies.7 In tandem with the German Rentiers’League, women from the DVP and DNVP (and to some extent the DemocraticParty) became the primary spokespeople of the small pensioners. Their approachwas two-fold: at the grass-roots level, women from the two parties attempted toorganize direct help for the small rentiers, particularly during the worst period ofthe inflation. On the legislative level, they pushed for fast relief measures anddemanded a law giving restitution to the rentiers for a substantial part of their lostsavings. They emphasized that it was degrading for members of the middleclasses to stand in line for social-welfare checks together with social dropoutsand the lowest strata of the working class. At the very least, they demanded thatthe state separate support for the small rentiers from poor relief.

Already in the National Assembly, the DNVP’s Anna von Gierke haddemanded relief measures for the small rentiers. Pointing out that most rentiershad invested their money in government papers and war bonds, she argued thatthe state had the duty to support them now that these papers were rapidly losingtheir value.8 In 1922, Elisabeth Spohr of the DNVP repeatedly demanded reliefmeasures in the Prussian Landtag, pointing out that desperation had inducedmany small rentiers to commit suicide.9 In late 1923, Annagrete Lehmann calledon DNVP members to invite small rentiers to dinner and to make a heated room

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available to them for part of the day.10 When the Reich government in February1924 fell far short of paying restitution for the lost assets of the small rentiers,Paula Mueller-Otfried took up the battle in the Reichstag. In accordance with theclaim of the German Rentier’s League, she demanded that a law be passed thatrecognized the rentiers’ right to restitution and argued that the existing relief wasinadequate and poorly administered. When confronted with a proposal for anacross-the-board increase in poor relief, she echoed the claims of the smallrentiers by arguing that the Reichstag had to make a distinction between peoplewho had been impoverished through their own fault and those who had beenimpoverished through the mistake of the state. She therefore demanded that statesupport be increased only for those disabled by the war and for the small rentiers.The proposal that passed did incorporate this suggestion.11

In the campaign for the Reichstag elections of December 1924, the DNVPmade extensive restitution promises to the rentiers that soon came to haunt theparty. Although many DNVP supporters had been creditors hurt by the inflation,influential party groups associated with big industry and agriculture belonged tothe debtors who had fared reasonably well. These circles rejected any effectiverevaluation legislation that would have benefited the creditors including thesmall rentiers. The opponents of revaluation had kept a low profile during theelection campaigns of 1924 because they knew that the DNVP’s pro-creditorrhetoric attracted many voters in the two Reichstag elections of that year. Butthey reasserted their influence in the spring of 1925, when the Reichstag begandiscussing a revision of the previous year’s revaluation legislation. This was at atime when the DNVP leaders, participating for the first time in the Reich govern-ment, found it difficult to deny the financial impossibility of substantial revalu-ation – which they had ignored during the election campaign. Things came to ahead in May 1925 after the DNVP signed on to a revaluation compromise thatbelied its campaign promises. The rentiers were outraged and accused the DNVPof voter fraud. Indeed, as one historian of revaluation concludes: “The DNVPwas not alone in making elastic promises, but its were the most elastic.”12 Itbecame known that DNVP leaders, while making their campaign promises, hadall along doubted the financial feasibility of extensive restitution and knownabout the strong, though initially passive, resistance against revaluation in theirparty. The whole affair revealed the cavalier attitude of DNVP leaders toward theelectorate and dealt a severe blow to the party’s credibility.13

Whether the leading women of the DNVP deserved the criticism that rentiersnow hurled at the DNVP leaders is unclear. They certainly tried hard to win backthe confidence of the small rentiers after the disaster. Paula Mueller-Otfried inthe Reichstag as well as Elisabeth Spohr and Therese Deutsch in the PrussianLandtag pushed for relief measures, while stressing that only a law on restitutioncould bring justice to the small rentiers. But DNVP women now at least warned

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Small Rentiers


their audiences that the financial situation made full restitution of lost assetsimpossible.14 Mueller-Otfried quickly became a nationally recognized expert onthe issue; she published several pamphlets on the small rentiers in which sheargued that the suffering of the small rentiers came directly from the loss of thewar (which she blamed on socialists and democrats) and the misguided govern-ment policies up to 1925 – before the DNVP joined the Reich government.Mueller-Otfried displayed an impressive knowledge of the issue in all its legaland financial complexities, but she consistently ignored the resistance of pro-debtor groups in her party. Although she did acknowledge in passing that theDVP women were working in the same direction, her overriding claim was thatthe DNVP was the rentiers’ only forceful representative and that all would bewell for the small rentiers if only the DNVP had twice as many Reichstag seats.15

The small-rentier issue became important again at the time of the Reichstagelections in May 1928. In late 1927, the Reich government and the Reichstag hadagreed to raise payments to rentiers slightly without making a distinctionbetween small rentiers and social-welfare recipients. Mueller-Otfried and theDNVP, considering the raise unsatisfactory, had fought hard to channel thescarce financial resources to the small rentiers alone, but this time they failed toprevail against the opposition of the Left, the Center Party, and the DemocraticParty.16 After the breakup of the center-to-right coalition over the NationalSchool Bill in February 1928, DNVP women revived their campaign for therentiers in preparation for the elections. They increasingly shifted their claimfrom the controversial revaluation of lost assets to the right to a secure incomefor rentiers, urging the government and the Reichstag to help quickly and effec-tively and not to wait until most small rentiers hurt by the inflation had died. Butthe DNVP women had to defend their party’s record on small-rentier rightsagainst fierce attacks from new splinter parties that made revaluation theirprimary cause. Mueller-Otfried and her colleagues pointed out that these splinterparties would have no power in the Reichstag and argued that the much largerDNVP was still loyal to the rentiers’ cause.17 Although weakened by the elec-tions of 1928, the DNVP resumed its struggle for a rentier’s compensation law inthe new Reichstag. In February 1929, Annagrete Lehmann, speaking in the placeof the ailing Paula Mueller-Otfried, demanded that the Reichstag draft a rentierbill on short order. She again stressed that the small rentiers deserved compen-sation because they had been hurt by the state, and that they should not begrouped together with welfare recipients. Her initiative again floundered on theresistance mainly of the SPD, the Communist Party, and the Center Party, whoproposed to draw the circle of aid recipients much larger, thus diluting theexpected benefits.18

With the onset of the Great Depression, the suffering of small rentiers againcaptured the attention of the leading DNVP women. In the summer and fall of

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1930, Mueller-Otfried made the most passionate pleas to date in the Reichstag,attacking the government under Center Party chancellor Heinrich Brüning for“cold-heartedly” ignoring the fate of weak and well-meaning people and callingon the government to “finally heal this bleeding wound.”19 The DNVP womencontinued to demand a compensation law in principle, but the economic crisisafter 1929 made such thoughts unrealistic, so that most initiatives from DNVPwomen now centered on more coincidental relief for the small rentiers. TheReichstag and successive governments paid lip service to the small rentiers’cause, but nothing happened. In late 1931, Mueller-Otfried wrote an open letterto the Reich Labor Minister, imploring him to stop treating the rentiers like adying caste, but to no avail. The only notable success came in Danzig, whereDNVP Volkstag member Anni Kalähne drafted and promoted a restitution lawfor small rentiers that was passed in June 1931.20

The DVP women pursued almost parallel policies with respect to the smallrentiers, and they also faced difficulties from the pro-debtor groups in their party,mainly big industry. The DVP, too, made campaign promises in 1924 that it wasunable to fulfill, but the fact that it participated in government almost perma-nently from 1922 to 1931 made it more respectful than the DNVP of the Reich’sfinancial realities. Among the DVP women, Prussian Landtag deputy Jane Voigtplayed a pioneering role. In her home town Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, shehad already started a pilot program to support small rentiers in 1920. Voigtconvinced the town government to open a heated room for small rentiers duringthe winter; she collected money from businesses and distributed it to nearly fivehundred rentiers; and she organized free lunches for rentiers in the homes ofwealthy citizens. To these services she later added a work registry for smallrentiers and a series of initiatives to grant small rentiers rebates on the cost ofelectricity, gas, and coal, the predominant heating fuel.21 Voigt’s success inspiredefforts by the DVP’s women’s committee in Schleswig-Holstein to introducesimilar services in all of the province. Work registries were particularlysuccessful; they allowed older women, who had a hard time finding employment,to earn something by, for example, doing needlework for wealthy families.22 Inthe RFA, Voigt formed a special committee for the small rentiers that issuedguidelines on how DVP women could help rentiers through advising, practicalhelp, and social events. The initiatives of Flensburg thus became the model for anation-wide effort.23

Elsa Matz soon took up the issue in the Reichstag. She was a candidate inPomerania, where many small rentiers lived. Matz was instrumental in the delib-erations leading to the Reichstag law that was passed in February 1923. LikeMueller-Otfried, she established herself as a national authority on small-rentierquestions. In reaction to Mueller-Otfried’s pamphlet, Matz wrote her own, whichwas less polemical and propagandistic than Mueller-Otfried’s although Matz,

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Small Rentiers


too, said nothing about the pro-debtor interests in her party.24 Matz tried consis-tently to put the small rentiers on the same level as war veterans – claiming thatthey had been patriotic citizens who had supported the state in its time of greatestneed. Thus, she sometimes called them the “veterans of work.”25 Probably toexclude working-class people with very small savings from restitution, Matzinsisted that compensation was feasible only if people with a minimum of 10,000marks in lost savings were reimbursed – whereas the SPD demanded a minimumof one thousand marks. To make that distinction clearer, Matz began using theterm “capital rentier” (Kapitalrentner) instead of “small rentier” (Kleinrentner)in her speeches and articles.26

After the disappointing government compromise of May 1925, for which theDVP shared responsibility with the DNVP, Matz, Voigt, and other DVP womensought to keep the issue alive. Frequently they demanded a Reich law and aPrussian law together with the DNVP women. Matz published a stream of arti-cles on the issue in the Nationalliberale Correspondenz. Almost all of these arti-cles appeared in the main section of the newspaper and not in its biweeklywomen’s supplement. Many of them even appeared as leader articles on the frontpage of the newspaper. This shows that the issue was taken seriously by the partyas a whole and that Matz had established herself as the leading DVP expert onthe small rentiers.27 Matz shared the disappointment of the DNVP women whenthe Reich government missed what seemed to be a good opportunity for a newrentiers’ law in late 1927 and early 1928; she further shared their frustration overthe attacks from the German Rentiers’ League on the DVP and DNVP.28 At leastthe DNVP had left the coalition government in time (February 1928) to formu-late its own demands without concern for the actual implementation of policies,an advantage it preserved when it stayed out of the Grand Coalition governmentformed with DVP support after the May 1928 Reichstag elections.29

Matz fought many Reichstag battles for the small rentiers. On one occasion,she got into a rhetorical duel with Center Party deputy Hermann Esser andannounced: “whoever wants a fight should also get it from a woman.” Thiscomment was received with such disruptive laughter that Reichstag PresidentPaul Löbe (SPD) had to call the Reichstag to order.30 But Matz also expressedfrustration over the limits that continuous government responsibility imposed onthe DVP’s ability to make promises: “The German People’s Party has over thelast couple of years done everything it could for the rentiers. We were, of course,bound by the governments in which we participated and unable to make the far-reaching demands that the Democratic Party and the DNVP were able to advanceafter joining the opposition.”31 Matz recognized that a satisfactory law securingthe income of small rentiers was unrealistic after the onset of the GreatDepression, but she kept pushing for relief measures without giving up the claimfor a restitution law.32 Seeing the rentier’s issue being pushed to the background

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by the problems of mass unemployment, Matz tried to effect relief for the rentiersin various government emergency decrees throughout the depression years. Asearly as 1931 she pointed out that many disgruntled rentiers were turning to theNSDAP for support.33 That she and other DVP women repeatedly called on theirReichstag group to continue pushing for a rentiers’ law suggests that they alsohad to convince people in the DVP.34

The rentier issue led DVP and DNVP women into the jungle of interest poli-tics that was gnawing at the vital nerve of their parties. Lacking close ties to bigindustry, they were able to side with the interests of a group of middle-classpeople who had stylized themselves as the “quintessential victims of the infla-tion.”35 The small rentiers appeared to embody bourgeois virtues close to theheart of right-wing women such as patriotism and thriftiness. Providing a polit-ical voice to this group appealed to the maternalist mission of right-wing womenand to their concern for the harmony of the Volksgemeinschaft. Yet the small-rentier issue, to which women from both parties devoted so much energy, didnothing to bolster their claim to healing and strengthening the Volks-gemeinschaft. First, they failed to reconcile the interests of diverse economicgroups in their parties and to prevent most of the disgruntled rentiers fromchoosing other parties. Second, they reflected a widespread bourgeois prejudiceand revealed a narrowly class-based view of the Volksgemeinschaft when theyinsisted on separating a socially declining middle-class group as “deservingpoor” from the lower-class “undeserving poor.”

Notes

1. Paula Mueller-Otfried, Kleinrentnernot, Aus Deutschlands Not und Ringen1, 2nd edn, Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle, 1928.

2. Falter, Hitlers Wähler, pp. 271–2.3. Robert Scholz, “‘Heraus aus der unwürdigen Fürsorge’: Zur sozialen Lage

und politischen Orientierung der Kleinrentner in der Weimarer Republik.”In Christoph Conrad and Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz, eds.,Gerontologie und Sozialgeschichte. Wege zu einer historischen Betrachtungdes Alters (Berlin: Deutsches Zentrum für Altersfragen, 1983), p. 332.

4. The higher portion was given by Elsa Matz in “Zahlenmäßige Grundlagenfür ein Rentnerversorgungsgesetz,” NLC 54, no. 209, 26 November 1927.Matz included married women who were dependent on the savings of theirhusbands in her figure. Other figures may only have included the husbands.

5. Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society inthe German Inflation, 1914–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press,1993), pp. 556–7; David Crew, Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 104–6; Young-

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Small Rentiers


Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 103–9.

6. Crew, Germans on Welfare, pp. 99–102, offers some instructive examples.7. Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, pp. 91 and 122–3;

Feldman, The Great Disorder, p. 556.8. Verhandlungen der Nationalversammlung, 1919–1920, vol. 333, pp.

5526–7.9. “Wohlfahrtsfragen,” Frauenkorrespondenz, 3, no. 18, 3 June 1922; see also

notes on her speech in the Landtag in Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 28, 1November 1922, and VdL, 1921–1924, vol. IX, p. 12577.

10. Annagrete Lehmann, “Tätige Liebe,” Frauenkorrespondenz, 22 December1923.

11. VdR, 1924–1924, vol. 381, pp. 536–7 and 642–4; “Die Fürsorgepflicht fürdie Kleinrentner,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 27, 9 July 1924;“Kleinrentnerfürsorge,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 42, 22 October 1924.

12. Michael Hughes, Paying for the German Inflation (Chapel Hill and London:University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 114 and 145–8.

13. Ibid., pp. 148–50.14. Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Kleinrentnerfürsorge,” Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no.

49, 2 December 1926; Mueller-Otfried, “Eine dringende Forderung,”Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 2, 13 January 1927; “Kleinrentnerfürsorge,”Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 14, 7 April 1927; Therese Deutsch, “Klein-rentnerfragen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 26, 30 June 1927; Klara Klotz,“Eine dringend notwendige Forderung,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 34, 25August 1927. See also VdR, 1924–1928, vol. 384, p. 533, vol. 389, p. 5808,vol. 394, p. 12086, and vol. 395, p. 13755.

15. Mueller-Otfried, Kleinrentnernot, particularly pp. 4–8 and 12.16. Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Wer schimpft, hat Unrecht,” Frauenkorrespondenz

9, no. 51, 22 December 1927, and Mueller-Otfried, Kleinrentnernot, pp.12–16.

17. Therese Deutsch, “Denkschrift über Kleinrentnerfragen,” Frauen-korrespondenz 10, no. 13, 29 March 1928; Paula Mueller-Otfried, “NichtFürsorge, sondern Gerechtigkeit für die Rentner!” Frauenkorrespondenz 10,no. 14, 5 April 1928, and Mueller-Otfried, “Die neueste Entwicklung derRentnerfrage,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 15, 12 April 1924; see alsoErika Altgelt, “Wie wird der Kleinrentner wählen?” Frauenkorrespondenz10, no. 17, 26 April 1928.

18. VdR, 1928–1930, vol. 424, pp. 1157–9; Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Rentner-versorgungsgesetz gescheitert,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 7, 14February 1929; RFA, “Der Rechtsanspruch des Rentnerstandes,” Frauen-korrespondenz 11, no. 8, 21 February 1929.

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19. “Kleinrentnerfragen im Reichstag,” Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 29, 17July 1930; VdR, 1930–1932, vol. 444, p. 426.

20. “Aus der deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, 15June 1931. For Mueller-Otfried’s letter, see “Die Not der Kleinrentner,”Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 1, 1 January 1932.

21. Jane Voigt, “Zur Rentnerfürsorge,” Mitteilungen Deutsche VolksparteiSchleswig-Holstein 3, no. 8, 28 April 1921; Voigt, “Rentnerhilfe,”Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4, no. 19/20, 4 November 1922.

22. Elisabeth Cimbal, “Das Rentnerhilfswerk des WkFA der DVp. in Schleswig-Holstein,” Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4, no. 21/22, 21 November 1922.

23. Elsa Matz, “Zur Frage der Kleinrentnerfürsorge,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3,no. 28, 14 July 1922; “Klein-Rentnerfürsorge,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no.42, 24 November 1922.

24. Elsa Matz, Kleinrentnerfragen. Das Rentnerversorgungsgesetz, Flug-schriften der Deutschen Volkspartei 71 (Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag,1928). See also Elsa Matz, “Das Kleinrentnergesetz,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt4, no. 3, 2 February 1923.

25. See the summary of her speech at the 1924 national conference of the DVP:“Fünfter Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei in Hannover am 29. und 30.März,” NLC 51, special issue. See also Matz, Kleinrentnerfragen, p. 4, andMatz, “Zur Frage der Rentnerversorgung,” NLC 54, no. 198, 9 November1927, and the summary of her speech in front of the DVP small rentiers’committee in Berliner Stimmen 2, no. 27, 1 October 1925.

26. See for example Elsa Matz, “Die neue Kleinrentnerdenkschrift desReichsarbeitsministeriums,” NLC 56, no. 5, 9 January 1929.

27. For some examples see Elsa Matz, “Die Kleinrentner-Interpellation derDeutschen Volkspartei,” NLC 53, no. 29, 12 February 1926; Matz,“Reichsarbeitsministerium und Rentnerfürsorge,” NLC 53, no. 89, 21 May1926; Matz, Reichsrentnertagung,” NLC 53, no. 195, 29 November 1926;Matz, “Regierungsparteien und Kleinrentner,” NLC 54, no. 51, 15 March1927; Matz, “Eine Notlösung in der Kleinrentnerfrage,” NLC 54, no. 66, 6April 1927; Matz, “Was nun?” NLC 54, no. 118, 30 June 1927; Matz,“Zahlenmäßige Grundlagen für ein Rentnerversorgungsgesetz,” NLC 54,no. 209, 26 November 1927; Matz, “Die Weihnachtsbeihilfe für dieKleinrentner,” NLC 54, no. 220, 14 December 1927; Matz, “DasRentnerversorgungsgesetz,” NLC 55, no. 15, 25 January 1928.

28. Elsa Matz, “Die Zukunft des Rentnerversorgungsgesetzes,” NLC 55, no. 62,4 April 1928, and Matz, “Wahlergebnis und Rentnerversorgungsgesetz,”NLC 55, no. 104, 13 June 1928.

29. Elsa Matz, “Ein Fortschritt in der Rentnerfrage,” NLC 55, no. 226, 14December 1928.

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Small Rentiers


30. VdR, 1928–1930, vol. 428, pp. 5958–60.31. VdR, 1928–1930, vol. 424, p. 1174.32. Elsa Matz, “Der Stand der Kapitalrentnerfrage,” NLC 57, no. 139, 22 July

1930. See also Elsa Matz, “Die Verzögerung des Rentnergesetzes,” NLC 56,no. 224, 7 November 1929.

33. Matz, “Kapitalrentnernot!” NLC 58, no. 185, 23 September 1931; Matz,“Kleinrentner und Wohlfahrtserwerbslose,” NLC 59, no. 30, 13 February1932; Matz, “Kapitalrentner und Gesetzgebung,” NLC 59, no. 229, 21December 1932; Matz, “Beseitigung von Härten in der Kleinrentner-fürsorge,” NLC 60, no. 16, 26 January 1933. The connection between smallrentier disappointment and Nazi support is at the center of the argument inScholz, “‘Heraus aus der unwürdigen Fürsorge’. Zur sozialen Lage undpolitischen Orientierung der Kleinrentner in der Weimarer Republik.”

34. “Tagung volksparteilicher Parlamentarierinnen,” NLC 56, no. 17. 25January 1929.

35. Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, p. 103.

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–7–

Foreign Policy

We German women cannot stand back in this struggle. It is a pure, holy, andnon-violent struggle for the memory of our dead, who died for Germany, forthe future of the children and the unborn who need a Germany where life isworth being lived.

Resolution of DVP women on Germanwomen’s obligation to fight Versailles, June 19221

The First World War had intensified women’s interest in foreign affairs andshown to what extent international events affected the family and the home. Afterthe defeat, women politicians were aware that the Treaty of Versailles impingedon many spheres of German life and that foreign policy needed to be addressedalso as an interest of women.2 Although women were rarely allowed to speak onforeign-policy matters in the Reichstag, they felt that they shared responsibilityfor Germany’s international standing and that they had to use their new politicalrights to improve it wherever possible.3 This was particularly important to DVPand DNVP women, who saw a close link between their social and cultural poli-cies and German foreign policy. Their concern about the declining birthrate, theirfight for a stricter morality, and the racial hygiene arguments of DNVP womenall had a crucial foreign policy component.

Given their maternalist ideology, women across the bourgeois party spectrumenvisioned a special role for themselves in foreign policy: if even Germanwomen with their allegedly instinctive sense of justice condemned the peacetreaty and its consequences, then the hostile nations would recognize thatVersailles needed to be revised. Women from all bourgeois parties thus organizeda series of common protests against Versailles and its implementation. Theycondemned the demand for the extradition of the Kaiser and the military leaders,protested Germany’s territorial losses, attacked reparation measures such as thedelivery of milk cows to France, and led a long campaign against the charge thatGermany had started the First World War. They also opposed the military occu-pation of Western Germany by the victors of the war and vehemently objected tothe presence of African soldiers in France’s occupation army.4 Women also sawthemselves as guardians of the Germans living in areas annexed by other

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countries after 1918, particularly the territories won by Poland.5 Referring totheir thinking about women’s cultural mission, they saw it as their special task tomaintain links to all Germans abroad and to support their struggle for preservingtheir “Germandom” against foreign cultures.

Although women from the whole center-to-right spectrum supported theseefforts, divisive issues lurked behind their joint demonstrations of national soli-darity. Whereas socialist women and some women on the left wing of the bour-geois women’s movement derived a commitment to international reconciliationfrom their maternalist ideology, most women in the DVP and DNVP expresseda defiant nationalist and at times racist spirit and denounced pacifism. Accordingto them, German women ought to unite their people and educate the young in adefiant nationalist spirit rather than working for international reconciliation. Thewomen on the right considered a lasting peace possible only after an extensiverevision of the Versailles peace order in favor of Germany. Many initially evenrejected the participation of women in international conferences where theywould meet representatives of countries supportive of the “war-guilt lie”. Butopposition softened after a while, particularly in the DVP, because nationalistwomen recognized that they could use these conferences to raise sympathy forGermany abroad and because they hated to leave the representation of Germanyto left-wing women.

Outrage at the Treaty of Versailles dominated the foreign-policy statements ofwomen from both parties in the early Weimar years. The DVP women, in partic-ular, vociferously protested the policies of the victors and the alleged spineless-ness of successive German governments; their talks on nationalism, unlike theirspeeches on women’s position in the party, always received loud applause by themen at DVP party meetings. Almost every women’s section of the DVP-Nachrichtenblatt in 1919–1923 contained an angry article on foreign policy.Already at the first party conference in April 1919 Emmy Voigtländer predictedthat the peace treaty, which was published a few weeks later, would mean a peaceerected on the graveyard of the German people, and she suggested that the denialof the war-guilt charge was Germany’s best weapon against the claims of thevictors.6 Jane Voigt, who spoke after Voigtländer, earned enthusiastic applausewhen she conjured up the patriotic spirit of Germans in the German-Danishborder region, where it was already known that the victors of the war woulddemand a plebiscite to redraw the border. Women made similar professions ofnationalism at the second party conference in October 1919, where MarieBernays gave a widely acclaimed speech that rejected pacifism while stressingthat women’s educational activity would strengthen the nation: Knowing “thatthe best inheritance of the children is the heroism of the fathers,” German womenshould make their children aware of this inheritance and give the nation newcourage for recovery.7 Clara Mende’s attacks on Versailles even induced the

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French authorities in 1922 to prohibit her from speaking in the occupied WestGerman territories, as the DVP press reported with pride.8

In this context, DVP women stressed that Versailles mattered to women notonly because of its economic consequences but also because it concerned theirrole as the “natural” mediators between the generations. They argued thatVersailles besmirched Germany’s tradition and its war dead while condemningthe next generations to grow up in virtual slavery and dishonor. Unless Germanwomen condemned Versailles and sought to revise it, they would be unable toraise their children in the spirit of national tradition and authority they consid-ered crucial for creating a strong and stable society. On the third anniversary ofthe ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, the RFA of the DVP wrote: “WeGerman women cannot stand back in this struggle. It is a pure, holy, and non-violent struggle for the memory of our dead, who died for Germany, for thefuture of the children and the unborn who need a Germany where life is worthbeing lived.”9 In a similar vein, Mende stressed that mothers had to strengthenthe national and religious feelings of their children and to keep awake thememory of Germany’s glorious historial periods and great men.10 Anothercontribution to the women’s section of the DVP-Nachrichtenblatt argued thatmothers should strive to preserve the spirit of Imperial Germany’s officer corpsand thus to raise their sons to be courageous, obedient, and respectful ofauthority. “This educational influence of the much-castigated ‘militarism’ shouldnot be lost to us, if we want to maintain a youth capable of fighting.”11 A DVPactivist from Prussian Saxony exhorted German diplomats going to an interna-tional conference to demand complete equality with other peoples and recogni-tion for Germany’s right to rise again: “For there is one thing that we, the Germanwomen and mothers, demand: a future for our children.” German children shouldgrow up as free humans and not as slaves.12 To make every German child awareof his or her chains, the DVP women in the Reichstag proposed that the Treatyof Versailles be taught to all students in their last year of school and that the fateof Germans in the lost or occupied areas be included in the curriculum. Matzjustified these demands in talks with the Interior Ministry in June 1922.13

Women in the DVP recognized the need to educate German women generallyon matters of foreign policy. They strove to show that reparations were respon-sible for the rising prices that the housewife had to pay in the shops, and foreignpolicy often took center stage at the conferences for regional or local women’scouncils and in the courses for women of all parties that Kardorff-von Oheimboffered at her home in Goslar.14 Mende and Stropp also advocated a more activerole for women in foreign policy. True to the theory that women ought to bringtheir “female” qualities to all areas of politics and society, Mende encouragedwomen to take responsibility for matters that had been considered the traditionalpreserve of men, such as foreign policy, and suggested that German consulates

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in neutral countries employ women. These women should play a special role incommunicating the misery of the Germans to foreign countries.15 When Frenchtroops occupied Frankfurt am Main and other cities east of the Rhine river inearly 1920, Emma Stropp wondered what women could do to resist this renewedhumiliation. To fight on the “wagon circle,” as Germanic women once did, wasfutile, even if many German women now longed for the opportunity. But womencould improve the situation by voting for the DVP and thus removing incapableand spineless governing men from power: “Our weapon today is the ballot.”Hatred of the men in the government (Regierungsmänner) for a moment evenseems to have deflected Stropp’s anger at the men in her own party, whose anti-feminism she criticized more loudly than most DVP women.16 It was onlyconsistent that Stropp also called for the admission of women to the diplomaticservice, arguing that famous female rulers had conducted an ingenious foreignpolicy and that the greater sensitivity of women had historically enabled them tounderstand foreign countries better than men. The poor record of male diplomatsin the early Weimar years, according to Stropp, was reason enough to place moreconfidence in women.17

One method of contesting the peace treaty that was suitable for women wassuggested by Voigtländer at the DVP’s first party conference: to deny the war-guilt charge. Many Germans believed that the most punitive provisions of theTreaty of Versailles were based on the claim that Germany and its allies hadstarted the war, and that the moral justification of the peace would crumblewithout that one piece. Since women in all bourgeois parties agreed that moralitywas primarily a women’s issue and that women, not having fought each otherwith weapons in hand, would raise a more effective voice for justice than men,women from the DVP and all other bourgeois parties became highly active inprotesting the war-guilt charge. In 1921 Voigtländer and Katharina Kardorff-vonOheimb were instrumental in founding a committee to fight it, the GermanWomen’s Committee for the Struggle against the War-Guilt Lie (DeutscherFrauenausschuss zur Bekämpfung der Schuldlüge, DFBS). This committee drewwomen mostly from the DVP and DNVP, but the Center and Democratic Partywere also involved. Mende and Annagrete Lehmann chaired it for many years,and the women’s press of the DVP and DNVP reported every meeting.18

Voigtländer and Mende conducted an emotional campaign against the war-guiltcharge, arguing for example that it cost millions of Germans their lives by justi-fying an immensely stifling and destructive peace.19 Every admission of Germanatrocities during the First World War, like every even remotely positive statementon Versailles and its implications, was considered by the DVP women as supportfor the “war-guilt lie” and thus as high treason. When three women from the leftwing of the German women’s movement traveled to an international conferencein London in 1924 and made some comments that seemed to reveal such a

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tendency, an outraged Mende demanded that the German Foreign Ministry denyexit visas to these women. The Women’s Committee against the War-Guilt Liepublished a declaration whose title, “An den Pranger” (“To the pillory”), impliedthat the three women should be publicly exposed.20

Another way for women to contain the negative effects of Versailles was tofoster connections with Germans in the occupied territories and abroad.Consistent with the idea of the woman as the preserver of culture, the women ofthe DVP agreed that these contacts were a special women’s duty. Women fromthe DVP (and DNVP) visited almost every women’s meeting of theGroßdeutsche Volkspartei in Austria, a pro-German right-wing party, and of theDeutsche Nationalpartei, a party of the German minority in Czechoslovakia.21

Else Frobenius, who presided over the women’s committee of the GermanProtective League for the Germans on the Borders and Abroad (DeutscherSchutzbund für die Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschen), exhorted DVP women tooffer charitable help to Germans expelled from foreign countries and draw theminto the DVP. The presumption was that when these Germans one day returnedto their previous areas of settlement they would carry the nationalist spirit of theDVP abroad and foster their connections with Germany.22 In a practical effort tostrengthen the links among all ethnic Germans, DVP women organized holidaysin unoccupied Germany for children from territories under foreign occupation oradministration. They gave particular attention to children from the Rhineland soas to undercut French schemes to separate this area from mainland Germany.23

The leading women of the DVP also took part in the public campaign againstthe extradition of Germany’s wartime leaders, whom the Allies consideredsuspected war criminals but who were heroes to most Germans. During theNational Assembly’s subcommittee meetings examining the causes of Germany’sbreakdown, the women’s section of the DVP-Nachrichtenblatt stressed theheroism of the military figures Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, whostood at the top of the Allies’ list of individuals to be prosecuted.24 When theGerman government in February 1920 hesitated on how to respond to theEntente’s demand for the extradition of suspected war criminals, Stropp claimedthat most women, true to their “natural” inclination to unity, stood united behindan indignant rejection of this demand. She even declared the matter a test casefor the ability of political women to overcome party differences and demonstratenational unity. Women should live up to their claims of being the “guardians ofGermany’s national honor.”25

Women from the DVP were also involved in the notorious protests against thepresence of non-European, particularly African, soldiers in the French occupa-tion army in West Germany, dubbed the “Black Horror on the Rhine.” After a fewincidents that were blown out of proportion, many German newspapers started aparanoid and racist campaign against the French occupation troops, claiming that

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France deliberately sent soldiers from its African colonies to Germany so thatthey would rape and seduce German women. The press also insinuated thatFrance aimed to spread venereal disease among Germans, so as to undermineGerman morality and to weaken the German racial stock.26 Through its connec-tions to morality, rape, and reproduction, this slander campaign addressed“female” concerns. Women from all bourgeois parties, particularly the DVP andDNVP, thus showed great interest in it. By emphasizing the perceived outragesof the African soldiers, moreover, women could call into question the morality ofthe foreign occupation of West Germany and the Treaty of Versailles in general.

For the DVP, Stropp set the tone when she wrote about African soldiers in thePalatinate: “With their untamable bestiality, the negroes spread the mostdangerous sexual diseases.” She claimed, moreover, that French authorities sentinfected prostitutes to cities in the occupied area so as to further the spread ofvenereal disease in Germany. She admitted that some German women acceptedsexual relations with Africans for a piece of chocolate, but the decisive point forher was that the German authorities did nothing to stop all of this. Germanwomen thus had to protest the abuses to the whole world so as to stop “the rapesby bestialized savages, the system of brothels and prostitution, and demoraliza-tion as well as contamination.”27 When Luise Zietz of the Independent Socialistsheld a Reichstag speech in which she mentioned German war crimes on one levelwith the “Black Horror on the Rhine,” DVP women reacted with outrage. Howcould a German woman make this comparison in the Reichstag? Mende, whoanswered Zietz, attested to her a severe lack of feeling for her race and people.In a characteristic way, Mende argued that the scandal was not that Africanscommitted crimes – which she implied they would “naturally” do – but that theFrench government sent them to Germany.28 Women in the DVP continued toprotest the presence of non-European troops in France’s occupation army. Theyeven included the topic in a program paper submitted to the party conference of1921 by Mende. The paper stated: “It is intolerable that colored troops, repre-sentatives of low-ranking masses, exercise sovereignty over a high-standing,white people in the midst of European cultural life. It is intolerable that thepurity, health, and strength of the German race are endangered by coloredpeoples.”29 In the Reichstag, Elsa Matz criticized the prohibition of the dema-gogic and sexually explicit film Schwarze Schmach by the Reich Government,arguing that the film would have a very useful effect on the public in the UnitedStates and elsewhere even though she admitted that it was exaggerated andblatantly distorted.30 Even as late as January 1925, a woman writing for theNationalliberale Correspondenz conjured up the “bestiality of an occupationforce afflicted with venereal disease” and decried the fact that Germany had topay money for the occupation, which amounted to nothing less than “race shameand the poisoning of the German race.”31

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The aggressive nationalist tone of the DVP women reached fever pitch in1923, after French and Belgian troops had occupied the heavily industrializedRuhr district in response to Germany’s default on reparations payments. TheGerman government called for passive resistance in the occupied area, and awave of hyper-nationalist outrage swept Germany. DVP women attempted toapply international pressure on France through the remaining international chan-nels of the women’s movement, and in the summer of 1923 the RFA organized aconference of all DVP women parliamentarians in Bielefeld, close to the borderof the occupied Ruhr district. The meeting was a nationalist demonstrationduring which the DVP women issued a series of protest notes.32 After thiscrescendo, however, the tone got more moderate when Stresemann became chan-cellor and foreign minister on 12 August 1923. The women’s press of the DVPhardly commented on the cessation of passive resistance by Stresemann on 26September 1923. Although DVP involvement in the German Women’sCommittee against the War-Guilt Lie and other nationalist organizationscontinued with the same intensity, the opinion of DVP women promptly ralliedbehind Stresemann’s more conciliatory foreign policy.33 The DVP women alsobecame more compromising with respect to international conferences: whereasthey had at first condemned participation of Germans in conferences with repre-sentatives of countries supportive of the “war-guilt lie,” they now tended to stressthat patriotic women with proud bearing would be able to raise respect andsympathy for Germany at these meetings. Representation of German womenabroad should not be left to pacifists, who were not representative of Germanwomen as a whole.34

Until the summer of 1923 women in the DNVP and DVP displayed an almostidentical attitude on foreign policy. Leading DNVP women, such as Schirmacherand Spohr, were engaged for Germans in the eastern territories divided betweenGermany and Poland. Schirmacher, always committed to the most radical nation-alism, even called for resistance by all Germans, men and women, when hostili-ties between Polish troops and German irregulars erupted along the disputedborder in Upper Silesia in 1921: “A burning country needs burning hearts. Up!Go to the Upper Silesian front, burning hearts of German women!”35 The DNVPwomen were as involved in the German Women’s Committee against the War-Guilt Lie as their colleagues from the DVP, and the hatred of France manifest inthe statements of DVP women in 1923 was even stronger among the DNVPwomen. The DNVP was also very active in organizing vacations for childrenfrom areas under foreign occupation or administration.36 Women from bothparties – together with Catholic organizations and housewives’ leagues –launched a campaign for the boycott of French and Belgian goods during theRuhr occupation.37 The “Black Horror on the Rhine” was also one of the primaryconcerns of DNVP women in the early 1920s. Paula Mueller-Otfried initiated a

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petition to the League of Nations using the same racist language as Stropp’s art-icles, and Schirmacher addressed the issue several times in the NationalAssembly. In a question she submitted to the government, she claimed: “The lustof white, yellow, and black Frenchmen for German women leads to dailyviolence.”38 The women’s committees of the DNVP, which were responsible forpropaganda toward women, shamelessly used allusions to the “Black Horror” inelection campaigns. An election pamphlet from the state of Baden, for example,asked German women in 1920 to consider that because of the revolution“German women and girls now have to be sacrificed to Moroccans and Negroesfrom Senegal.” In a leaflet for the May 1924 Reichstag elections, the DNVPwarned: “Women! Do you wish the black beasts to come to you, too? Those whodefile and rape your sisters on the Rhine and Ruhr? The Reds preach fraterniza-tion and reconciliation even with white and black Frenchmen! Do you want to goalong? No??? Then vote for the DNVP!”39 As late as 1928 the Frauen-korrespondenz published a blatantly racist article against the few remainingAfrican soldiers in the occupied territories.40

One difference was that women from the DNVP in their statements on foreignpolicy tended to stress racism more strongly than their counterparts in the DVP.This was not obvious in the “Black Horror” campaign, where almost everybodyexcept the radical Left employed racist language. But when DNVP women justi-fied their interest in Germans abroad, they tended to argue that women, due totheir biological disposition as mothers, had a better understanding of race thanmen. As RFA member Erika Altgelt put it: “The woman has a deeper feeling thanthe man for the natural and fateful connection with the comrades of the Volk(Volksgenossen), with the German land (Scholle); this is true even if that landbelongs to a foreign country.”41 Schirmacher was particularly virulent indefining international conflicts as racial struggles. In a speech to the nationalconference of the DNVP in 1926, she argued that the First World War had beena struggle of Europe’s mixed races against “the last original and cultural people(Ur- und Kulturvolk) of the Indo-Germanic race, against us Germans.”42 Shedeveloped a delirious vision of Germany in the throes of a “negroized France”(an allusion to the African soldiers in the French army) and “animalisticMoscow” (her metaphor for “Jewish” bolshevism). Behind this double threat,she suspected a Jewish world conspiracy. The only defense for the Germans, sheclaimed, was to keep their race “clean” and to strengthen its Nordic elements.Women, as mothers and educators, would play a primary role in this task.43 Shethus gave women a central position in Germany’s international struggle whilereaffirming traditional gender divisions and the stress on motherhood. UnlikeSchirmacher, however, most DNVP women advocated a stronger gender separa-tion than women from the DVP. Magdalene von Tiling, for example, argued thatwomen needed to become more knowledgeable in foreign policy so that they

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could raise their children in a more patriotic spirit, but she believed that foreignpolicy would always remain in the hands of men and found nothing wrong withthat. Stropp’s and Mende’s calls for the deployment of women in Germany’sforeign service hardly resonated among female DNVP activists.44

DNVP women did not adopt the moderation that the DVP women displayedfrom the moment Stresemann became the key person in German foreign policy.While the DNVP leadership vehemently attacked the grand coalition governmentformed by Stresemann on 12 August 1923, particularly after Stresemann decidedto call off passive resistance,45 the hateful anti-French rhetoric of DNVP womencontinued unabated. In January 1924 Spohr wrote that the only possible attitudeof German women toward France was an absolute “no”, an attitude required by“the elementary völkisch instinct of self-preservation toward the most brutal anddetermined conqueror Germany has had to face in a thousand years.”46 Spohrdenied that Germany ever had the intention to violate the freedom of otherpeoples or to annex any territory against the will of its population and claimed thata peaceful understanding with France was impossible. When the DNVP Reichstaggroup split during the vote on the Dawes Plan, a new reparations agreement, on29 August 1924, the three women present at the meeting – Mueller-Otfried,Schott, and Sperber – all sided with the intransigent party faction. TheFrauenkorrespondenz had claimed that the Dawes Plan was a scheme to transformGermany into a “reparations colony,” that it was in some respects worse thanVersailles, and that it implied a renewed recognition of the “war-guilt lie”. Theoften-invoked loyalty of women to party principles would have made it difficultfor DNVP women to vote for the Dawes Plan, although many men did so afterhaving pronounced equally emphatic rejections of the plan.47

While the split vote triggered intense controversy in the party over participa-tion in the government and the course of foreign policy, the RFA, so it seems,attempted to stay above the troubled waters. The leading DNVP women pridedthemselves on their consistent rejection of the Dawes Plan but tried at the sametime to lick the wounds that the party had inflicted on itself and made it clear thatthey would not oppose the DNVP’s joining the government. An RFA commu-niqué after the vote, for example, claimed that the majority of women in the partyhad been strictly opposed to the Dawes Plan but that the main task of women nowwas to hold the party together and to make sure that their own determined nation-alism would become the basis of German foreign policy.48 At a regional DNVPwomen’s conference in Küstrin, a speaker questioned the party’s opposition toparticipation in government and stressed: “More than ever the national causerequires the cooperation of women. They have to help restore the heavily shat-tered confidence [in the party].”49

Although the ritualistic condemnations of the “war-guilt lie” and the outragedreports on the situation of Germans under foreign occupation or administration

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continued, DNVP women, together with the party at large, adopted a moremoderate position in the following years, when the DNVP participated in twogovernments that included Stresemann as foreign minister (1925 and1927–1928). Occasionally DNVP women even began to voice the opinion thatpatriotic women could do some good at international conferences.50 The maindemand of DNVP women, beyond the revocation of the war-guilt clause, wasnow the disarmament of the victor nations. The Treaty of Versailles included theprovision that all nations should disarm after German disarmament had beencompleted. After Germany’s military might had been reduced to the levelsrequired by the Treaty, the German Foreign Office made the case that France andBritain, in particular, failed to honor their part of the deal. DNVP women wantedto see this position stressed more strongly. In a series of articles for theFrauenkorrespondenz in June 1925, Reichstag member Ulrike Scheidel criti-cized Stresemann for failing to secure a commitment to disarmament from thevictor nations, and from April to June 1927 Hannah Brandt published a series ofarticles critical of Britain and France for rearming in violation of the clauses inthe Versailles Treaty.51

But the moderation in the years after 1924 was tenuous – both in the DNVP atlarge and among its women. In October 1925, the DNVP women applaudedwhen their party withdrew its ministers from the cabinet in protest against theTreaty of Locarno, in which Germany committed itself not to challenge itswestern border and signed arbitration treaties with its eastern neighbors Polandand Czechoslovakia. The leading DNVP women supported the party line, whichconsidered Locarno another step of the policy of fulfillment, and they warnedagainst German membership in the League of Nations, envisioned byStresemann and his conference partners for 1926.52 In June 1927, DNVP womenalso launched a hateful press campaign against Gertrud Bäumer, who hadpublished a conciliatory article on her visit to the First World War battle site ofVerdun. Reporting her impressions, Bäumer expressed doubts about the meaningof the carnage in 1916 and her amazement at the return of life to normalcy ontop of this atrocious battle field. In a vicious attack that was widely echoed byDNVP women, the DNVP’s Hanover activist Bertha Hindenberg-Delbrückaccused Bäumer of lacking respect for the German war dead and criticized herdoubts about the meaning of the German sacrifices as outrageous and frivolous.Bäumer replied that Hindenberg-Delbrück’s critique was distorting anddemogogic, but she was forced to make an awkward justification of her remarkswhile essentially agreeing with the values and interpretations Hindenberg-Delbrück had stressed.53 In reaction to her article, Bäumer received countlessangry letters, some of which accused her of participating in the “Jewishpoisoning of the people” and asked her, although she was unmarried, to concen-trate on mending her husband’s trousers.54

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In the second half of 1928, the DNVP women’s press again became moreintransigent in foreign policy matters. The DNVP now stood in opposition to thenew government, a coalition from the DVP to the SPD under the leadership ofSocial Democrat Hermann Müller. It could thus attack Stresemann’s foreignpolicy more sharply than before. Hugenberg’s election to party chair in October1928, moreover, signified a victory of the intransigent party wing, which hadalways shunned a realistic foreign policy. Finally, the DNVP women perceivedan alarming growth of interest in pacifism in Germany and, in particular, in theGerman women’s movement. In her leader articles for the Frauenkorrespondenz,Lehmann claimed that Stresemann’s foreign policy had utterly failed and that hehad conducted a policy without honor and self-respect. Germany, she argued, hadlong paid for all war damages inflicted on the enemies, so that all furtherpayments were simply punitive payments based on the “war-guilt lie.”55 Whenthe pacifist International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship(IAW) held a conference in Berlin in June 1929, around the tenth anniversary ofthe ratification of the peace treaty, women from the DNVP launched massiveattacks against the conference’s German organizers.56 DNVP women had tried toconvince the organizing committee to include a session on Versailles in theconference program, but to no avail. As a consequence, RFA member Ilse Hamelurged German women not to participate except as unofficial guests who shouldpoint out the suffering of Germany as a result of Versailles. Denying that women“by nature” welcomed international reconciliation, she called for women’sdemonstrations commemorating Versailles as a contrast to the IAW confer-ence.57 On 23 June, the German Women’s Committee against the War-Guilt Lieindeed staged a big memorial event for Versailles during which Mende andLehmann spoke. To accentuate the somber tone of the meeting, the Committeehad asked the audience to wear dark clothing, and serious music was playedbetween the speeches (the slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony anda Bach organ fugue). The event was so well attended that Berlin’s largePhilharmonic Hall could not hold all visitors.58 The Frauenkorrespondenz under-pinned the message of the Versailles memorial event with a barrage of articlesarguing that all international women’s solidarity was treason so long as Germanshad to suffer from reparations and Versailles. Schirmacher even called for deter-mined resistance against the victors, without revealing, however, how it shouldbe carried out: “Arise, the hour of struggle has arrived!”59

After the IAW conference, DNVP women focused their attacks on theproposed Young Plan, a new reparations settlement that eased some provisions ofthe Dawes Plan and distributed German reparations payments over a longerperiod. The DNVP, unencumbered by considerations of joining a centrist govern-ment again, categorically opposed any further German payments and commit-ments. Hugenberg even requested a referendum over a bill that would end all

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German payments and threatened those who signed the Young Plan with legalprosecution for high treason. The bill also called for an official revocation of thewar-guilt charge. To broaden support for it, Hugenberg joined forces with theNSDAP and other right-wing organizations. A popular vote on 2 November 1929gave the referendum just enough votes to make a plebiscite over the bill manda-tory. The plebiscite, however, failed by a clear margin on 22 December.60 Thatthe Young Plan extended German payments into the 1980s gave DNVP women awelcome opportunity to dust off their argument about women’s obligation toprevent the enslavement of their children. As Spohr put it: “We have no right toload our chains and the war-guilt lie onto the shoulders of our children andgrandchildren.”61 The DNVP women were happy that the proposed bill called foran official rejection of the war-guilt charge, and Lehmann defended the provi-sion that people signing the Young Plan would be sued for high treason. This wasa thorny issue, because Reich President Hindenburg, who was popular amongDNVP women, would have to sign the Young Plan before it could take effect. ButLehmann, who called the referendum a life-and-death question for Germany,argued that the provision was necessary because it showed that the people behindthe referendum were serious about it.62 In the Reichstag, Lehmann gave a speechin support of the referendum, claiming that all reparations demands by the Allieswere based solely on the “war-guilt lie” and demanding yet again that instructionon Versailles become mandatory in all German schools.63 Shortly before herdeath, Käthe Schirmacher mustered all her inflammatory rhetoric in support ofthe referendum: “It is exciting to say no in times of deepest national shame andnational surrender – to resist, to fight. The Germanic people were alwaysfighters; their sign was the light-spraying hammer. Be cheerful, optimistic – beGermanic! Swing the bright hammer of the referendum against the lie ofVersailles, against tributary payments, against national decadence, against thespoiling of our present and our distant future. We can win, if we want to win.Want it!”64

In the context of their campaign against the Young Plan, DNVP women alsorevived their critique of women’s alleged affinity to pacifism. At the nationalparty convention in Kassel in November 1929 women made the rejection of paci-fism their main cause. Erna von Birkhahn, the chair of the LFA Mecklenburg-Schwerin, sought to separate pacifism from Christianity by arguing that Godgave every people its “race and blood law” and a special task that it could notcomplete without national self-assertion. She admitted that war contradicts thecharacter of Jesus but claimed that loving commitment to one’s own people andstate lends justice to war. Spohr added that the rearmament of Germany’swartime enemies as well as the quest for independence and expansion of colo-nized peoples made pacifism and disarmament a foolish thing for Germany.65

Loyal to Hugenberg’s ideas, the DNVP women continued to criticize almost

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every treaty Germany concluded as insufficient, and they frequently pointed atalleged Polish threats to the east of Germany. Efforts of the IAW to prevent rear-mament in 1931–32 received harsh critique, with DNVP women arguing thatcementing the present disarmament of Germany would perpetuate war ratherthan preserving peace.66 Consequently, the DNVP women supported the deci-sion of the two housewives’ leagues to leave the BDF in 1932 because of a BDFnote on disarmament that the housewives considered too weak.67

The DVP women followed a more moderate line on foreign policy while menfrom their party occupied the Foreign Office: Stresemann from August 1923until his death on 3 October 1929 and then Julius Curtius until October 1931.They called for international reconciliation while always stressing that Versaillesand, in particular, the “war-guilt lie” were a great injustice to Germany. Withanger, they watched the DNVP women’s reaction to the Treaty of Locarno andcriticized Lehmann and her colleagues for claiming national feeling only forthemselves and their party. The DVP’s Martha Schwarz admitted that Germanwomen would not understand most provisions of the treaty, but she naivelysuggested that they should trust Reich President Hindenburg, who would surelyknow the matter inside out.68 Hoping to provide support for Stresemann’s foreignpolicy, DVP women approved of participation in international women’s confer-ences. In 1926, Elsa Matz and Gertraud Wolf attended the Paris conference of theIAW. But the substantive issues at this conference were overshadowed by ascandal that erupted after the French organizers of the conference mistakenlyraised the black-white-red flag of the German Empire before 1918 instead of theblack-red-gold flag of Weimar Germany. The women from the left-wing partiesand the Democratic Party in the German delegation rushed to take down the oldflag and demanded an immediate replacement. The DVP women, who reveredthe old flag, felt insulted by this act. The affair led to a press campaign betweenGertrud Bäumer of the Democratic Party and Gertraud Wolf of the DVP, who hadboth been present. Emma Ender, as chair of the BDF, finally reconciled the twosides. The issue received so much attention because the German governmentunder Chancellor Hans Luther had just resigned in the wake of a crisis triggeredby its initiatives to rehabilitate the old flag.69 DVP women also participated inthe IAW’s Berlin congress, which was so much maligned by the DNVP women.In a speech at the conference, Matz sought to undermine the morality ofVersailles and the war-guilt thesis by blaming the peace treaty for widespreadmisery.70 This was exactly how DVP women envisioned supporting Germany’srevisionist aims: to use participation in international conferences as a way ofundermining the legitimacy of Versailles and raising the sympathies of foreignwomen. In the disarmament debate, Matz and other DVP women later criticizedthe reluctance of France to disarm, but they did not go beyond the position of theGerman Foreign Ministry.71

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Despite the general preference for reconciliation after 1923, confrontational andchauvinist tones occasionally resurfaced in the DVP. In 1925, for example, Mendevented her frustration over the behavior of the Polish representative at theWashington conference of the International Council of Women in a diatribe againstPolish culture, which she ranked much below German culture: “A state that is builtup upon the disloyalty of its people toward its previous rulers and upon ingratitudetoward its helpers can, of course, not be expected to assume a high moral point ofview in international life.”72 DVP women, often in tandem with their sisters in theDNVP, continued to publish propagandistic accounts of the plight of Germans inPoland and along the “bleeding border” in the east.73 Warnings about Poland’s highbirthrate occasionally also appeared in their propaganda arsenal.

In conclusion, the women from the DVP and DNVP took a very strong interestin foreign-policy matters, but their activity usually reflected their maternalistidea of women’s role in politics. Women, as spiritual or real mothers, wereconsidered to have a special role in fostering the connections of Germans inoccupied areas or foreign countries to the German Volksgemeinschaft and inensuring the continuity of this link across the generations.74 As mothers, womenalso had to protect future generations of Germans from the dishonor andexploitation associated with Versailles and the “war-guilt lie.” Women’s involve-ment in foreign policy further revolved around the importance of morality, wherewomen had long claimed a mission of their own. The “Black Horror” campaign,with its strong racist elements, was declared a morality issue, and women fromboth parties, regardless of whether they supported the official German foreignpolicy or not, almost always advanced their arguments on the basis of morality –be it the importance of the “war-guilt lie” or the injustice of French militarystrength when considered in light of German disarmament.

Notes

1. “Zum 28. Juni 1922,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 26, 30 June 1922.2. See Doris Kaufmann, “Die Ehre des Vaterlandes und die Ehre der Frauen

oder der Kampf an der äusseren und inneren Front.” Evangelische Theologie46 (1986): 277–92.

3. Claudia Koonz, “Conflicting Allegiances.” Signs: Journal of Women inCulture and Society 1, no. 1 (1976): 663–83, here 672–3. From the fact thatwomen legislators rarely spoke on certain topics in the Reichstag we shouldnot infer that they were not interested in them.

4. Raffael Scheck, “Women Against Versailles.” German Studies Review 22(1999): 21–42, here 24–7.

5. On women’s pilgrimages to the German-Polish border, see ElizabethHarvey, “Pilgrimages to the ‘Bleeding Border’: Gender and Rituals of

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Nationalist Protest in Germany, 1919–1939.” Women’s History Review 9, no.2 (2000): 201–29.

6. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei (Berlin:Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1919), p. 86.

7. Marie Bernays, “Wie stärken wir Frauen die deutsche Volkskraft?” Berichtüber den Zweiten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei (Berlin:Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1920), p. 181.

8. “Volksparteiliche Frauen in den neuen Parlamenten,” NLC 51, no. 207, 12December 1924.

9. “Zum 28. Juni 1922,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 26, 30 June 1922.10. Clara Mende, “Die nationalen Pflichten der deutschen Frau,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 5, 29 January 1920.11. Helene Wenck, “Die Reichswehr und unsere Söhne,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt

2, no. 27, 8 July 1920.12. Ina Le Mang-Pfaff, “Die deutschen Frauen in Genf,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt

2, no. 39, 30 September 1920.13. See, for example, Beda Prilipp, “Die großen Vier am Werk,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 24, 16 June 1922, and Magdalene von Tiling, “ZurFrage der politischen Frauenpartei,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 13, 1October 1931; “Kulturaufgaben des Reiches,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no.24, 16 June 1922.

14. BA Koblenz, Nachlass Katharina Kardorff-von Oheimb (N 1039), vols. 25and 37.

15. Clara Mende, “Wirkungslosigkeit des Frauenstimmrechts?” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 32, 11 August 1922; “Sitzung des Reichs-frauenausschusses,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 42, 21 October 1920.

16. Emma Stropp, “Feind im Land!”, DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 15, 15 April1920. For Stropp’s critique of antifeminism in the DVP, see chapter 3.

17. Emma Stropp, “Die Außenpolitik und die Frauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3,no. 41, 10 November 1922.

18. Scheck, “Women against Versailles,” p. 26.19. Emmy Voigtländer, “Immer noch Begriffsverwirrung,” DVP-Nachrichten-

blatt 3, no. 13, 31 March 1921.20. Clara Mende, “Wenn deutsche Frauen ins Ausland gehen,” and “An den

Pranger,” both in NLC 51, no. 25, 20 February 1924.21. See for example “Bericht von der Frauentagung der Dt. Nationalpartei in

Troppau,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 40, 27 October 1922; “Volks-parteiliche Frauenarbeit 1922,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 5, 2 March1923; “Großdeutscher Frauentag in Wien,” NLC 52, no. 99, 26 May 1925;Annagrete Lehmann, “Vom Großdeutschen Parteitag in Bregenz,”Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 24, 14 June 1928.

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22. Else Frobenius, “Kulturaufgaben, für die wir eintreten müssen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 20, 20 May 1920, and Luise Marelle, “Der‘Schutzbund’ – neue Aufgaben der deutschen Frau” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt2, no. 23/24, 17 June 1920. On Frobenius and her engagement for theGermans living abroad, see also Lora Wildenthal, “Mass-MarketingColonialism and Nationalism: The Career of Else Frobenius in the‘Weimarer Republik’ and Nazi Germany.” In Ute Planert, ed., Nation, Politikund Geschlecht (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2000).

23. Käthe Rahmlow, “Nun erst recht!” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 6, 16 March1923, and Ilse Szagunn, “Über die Arbeit der Arbeitsgemeinschaft derFrauenausschüsse Groß-Berlins,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 23, 9November 1923.

24. “Satyrspiel, Beobachtungen und Gedanken einer Frau während der Sitzungvom 18. November des Untersuchungsausschusses,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt1, no. 9, 27 November 1919.

25. Emma Stropp, “Das Auslieferungsverlangen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no.7, 12 February 1920.

26. Sally Marks, “Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudiceand Prurience.” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 297–334; GiselaLebzelter, “Die ‘Schwarze Schmach’: Vorurteile – Propaganda – Mythos.”Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11, no. 1 (1985): 37–58; and Keith Nelson, “‘The Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War IDiplomacy.” Journal of Modern History 42, no. 4 (1970): 606–27.

27. Emma Stropp, “Der sexuale Schrecken im besetzten Gebiet,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 18, 6 May 1920.

28. “Aus der Nationalversammlung,” and Clara Mende, “Die zweite deutscheNationalversammlung,” both in DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 21, 27 May1920. See also VdR, Nationalversammlung, vol. 333, pp. 5695–6.

29. Die Deutsche Volkspartei und das Versailler Friedensdiktat, Flugschriftender DVP, vol. III-3 (Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1921).

30. VdR, 1920–1924, vol. 354, p. 6949.31. “Gegen die ‘Kulturschande’,” NLC, 52, no. 13, 21 January 1925.32. “Gegen Hungerblockade und Schandregiment: Die weiblichen

Abgeordneten der D. Vp. an der Grenze des besetzten Gebietes,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 14, 6 July 1923.

33. The only explicit report on the break-off of passive resistance in the DVPwomen’s press I could find was a declaration in support of Stresemann fromthe WkFA Solingen (DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 22, 26 October 1923).That the RFA did not issue a similar declaration may indicate ambivalenceabout Stresemann’s measure, which was seen as a shameful capitulation bymany rightists.

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34. “Sturmzeit,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 20, 28 September 1923, andGertraud Wolf, “Internationale Tagungen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 19,14 September 1923.

35. Käthe Schirmacher, “Für Oberschlesien,” Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no. 19,25 June 1921.

36. Scheck, “German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in the EarlyWeimar Republic,” pp. 49–51.

37. Frauenkorrespondenz 4, no. 4, 28 March 1923.38. See Verhandlungen der Nationalversammlung, vol. 341, interpellation no.

1898 (quoted), and vol. 343, interpellation no. 2771. See also Scheck,“German Conservatism,” pp. 49–50.

39. “Deutsche Frauen!” BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–44 (DNVP), vol. 8; Pamphlet inGStA Berlin, XII, IV, vol. 187 (emphasis in the original).

40. Maria Vogts, “Zehn Jahre besetztes Rheinland,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10,no. 48, 29 November 1928.

41. Erika Altgelt, “Frauenveranstaltungen beim Verein für das Deutschtum imAusland,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 23, 23 June 1927. See also “ZumOstmarkentag in Oberschlesien,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 18, 5 May1927.

42. Käthe Schirmacher, “Die Schwarze Schmach,” in: Führer durch denReichsparteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Köln a. Rh. vom 8. bis11. September 1926. Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle,[1926], pp. 30–2. BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–44 (DNVP), vol. 3 (1).

43. Käthe Schirmacher, “Frankreichs farbige Truppen,” Frauenkorrespondenz7, no. 51, 13 July 1925.

44. Magdalene von Tiling, “Zur Frage der politischen Frauenpartei.”45. Liebe, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei, p. 74.46. Elisabeth Spohr, “Unser Erbfeind Frankreich,” Frauenkorrespondenz 5, no.

10, 19 January 1924.47. Helene Freiin von Watter, “Kontroll- und Versklavungsmaßnahmen im

Sachverständigengutachten (Teil II),” Frauenkorrespondenz 5, no. 24, 18June 1924, and other articles by Watter in the following issues. See alsoRaffael Scheck, Alfred von Tirpitz and German Right-Wing Politics,1914–1930, Studies in Central European Histories (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:Humanities Press, 1998), pp. 176–9.

48. “Die Entscheidung des 29. August – ein Anfang,” and Dr. von Rundstedt,“Gewissensfragen,” both in Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 35, 3 September1924.

49. “Landesparteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Cüstrin-Neustadt am18. und 19. Oktober 1924,” Monatsmitteilungen für die Vertrauensmännerund Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei Kreisverein Soldin 6, no.

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10, 31 October 1924. See also Annagrete Lehmann, “Besinnung,” Frauen-korrespondenz 6, no. 40, 8 October 1924.

50. “Nationalbewußtsein und internationale Zusammenarbeit,” Frauen-korrespondenz 8, no. 35, 26 August 1926. See also “Frauenfragen,” in Weiß,ed., Politisches Handwörterbuch, p. 213.

51. Hannah Brandt, “Zum Zeichen der Abrüstung – I. Programm undTatsachen” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 17, 28 April 1927, and thefollowing issues until June 1927.

52. Ulrike Scheidel, “Was bedeuten die Abmachungen von Locarno?”Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 90, 26 November 1925; Scheidel, “Und nun …?” Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 6, 4 February 1926; Annagrete Lehmann,“Zum Vertrag von Locarno,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 88, 22 October1925, and Käthe Schirmacher, “Die Stellung der deutschnationalen Frauenzu Locarno,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 89, 24 November 1925.

53. Bäumer, “Mai über Verdun,” Die Frau 34, no. 9 (June 1927): 513–17; seealso Bertha Hindenberg-Delbrück’s open letter to Bäumer, inFrauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 25, 23 June 1927. The Frauenkorrespondenzrefused to publish Bäumer’s response and claimed to have received manyletters expressing outrage over her remarks and satisfaction overHindenberg-Delbrück’s article. See “Schlußwort an Frau Dr. GertrudBäumer,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 28, 14 July 1927.

54. Gertrud Bäumer, “Parteifanatismus über Gräbern,” Die Frau 34, no. 11(August 1927): 666–72.

55. Annagrete Lehmann, “Rückblick und Ausblick,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10,no. 52, 27 December 1928; Lehmann, “Kriegsschuldlüge und ‘Repara-tionen’,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 3, 17 January 1929.

56. Ulrike Scheidel, “Kriegsächtung und Kriegsverzicht? Entstehung undBedeutung des Kellogg-Pakts,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 36, 6September 1928. For background on the IAW, see Rupp, Worlds of Women,pp. 21–6.

57. Ilse Hamel, “Zum bevorstehenden internationalen Frauenkongreß inBerlin,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 22, 30 May 1929. See also IreneStoehr, Emanzipation zum Staat? (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1990), pp.128–31.

58. Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 24, 13 June 1929; Alice Freifrau von Bissing,“Zehn Jahre Versailles,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 26, 27 June 1929.

59. Käthe Schirmacher, “Die Lüge von Versailles,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11,no. 25, 20 June 1929.

60. Elisabeth Friedenthal, “Volksbegehren und Volksentscheid über denYoungplan und die deutschnationale Sezession” (unpublished PhD disserta-tion, Universität Tübingen, 1957).

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61. Elisabeth Spohr, “Kampf dem Tributplan,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 36,5 September 1929.

62. Annagrete Lehmann “Das Volksbegehren gegen die Versklavung desdeutschen Volkes,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 38, 19 September 1929.See also Lenore Kühn, “Was will der Young-Plan?” Frauenkorrespondenz11, no. 39, 26 September 1929, and Annagrete Lehmann, “AllerleiBedenken!” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 41, 10 October 1929.

63. VdR, 1928–1930, vol. 426, pp. 3323–5.64. Käthe Schirmacher, “Zum Volksbegehren,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no.

43, 24 October 1929.65. Frauenkorrespondenz, vol 11, no. 38, 19 September 1929; “Frauenreferate

auf dem Parteitag in Kassel: Pazifismus und deutsche Selbstbehauptung I.Referat: Erna v. Birkhahn”, and “Pazifismus und deutsche Selbst-behauptung II. Referat Spohr,” both in Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 47, 21November 1929.

66. Annagrete Lehmann, “Erklärung nationaler Frauenkreise an die GenferAbrüstungskommission,” and Erika Kames-Boelcke, “Deutsche Frau undAbrüstungskonferenz,” both in Die Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 17, 1December 1931.

67. Freda von Rechenberg, “Generalversammlung der RVDH,” Die Deutsch-nationale Frau 14, no. 12, 15 June 1932; see also Schmidt-Waldherr,Emanzipation durch Professionalisierung?, pp. 114 and 135–41, and Hönig,Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, pp. 131–42, who claims that the BDFdeclaration was a pretext for the housewives’ leagues, which had wanted toleave the BDF for a long time.

68. M. S. [Martha Schwarz], “Frauengedanken zu Locarno,” NLC 52, no. 219,25 November 1925.

69. Elsa Matz, “Internationale Frauenarbeit,” NLC 53, no. 119, 8 July 1926;“Noch einmal der ‘Flaggenvorfall’ beim Pariser Frauenkongreß,” NLC 53,no. 125, 21 July 1926; Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, pp.129–30.

70. “Zum Frauenweltbund-Kongreß” and “Rede der ReichstagsabgeordnetenFrau Dr. Matz auf dem Abend der Parlamentarierinnen des Frauen-weltbundes,” both in NLC 56, no. 128, 20 June 1929. See also Clara Mende,“Versailles,” and Martha Schwarz, “Politische Betrachtungen zum interna-tionalen Frauenkongreß in Berlin,” both in NLC 56, no. 133, 27 June 1929.

71. Elsa Matz, “Die Abrüstungsfrage und die Frauen,” NLC 58, no. 176, 10September 1931; Clara Mende, “Die Frauen zur Frage der Abrüstung,” NLC58, no. 217, 5 November 1931.

72. Clara Mende, “Der internationale Frauenbund in Washington, 4.-14. Mai1925,” NLC 52, no. 103, 2 June 1925.

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73. “Helft den deutschen Volksgenossen!” NLC 52, no. 157, 27 August 1925; H.M. [Hilde Margis], “Im Schneidemühler Optandenlager,” NLC 52, no. 185,7 October 1925; Martha Schwarz, “Reichsfrauenausschuß der DeutschenVolkspartei,” NLC 57, no. 236, 4 December 1930; Harvey, “Pilgrimages tothe ‘Bleeding Border’.”

74. For a good expression of this feeling, see Emma Stropp, “Friede undFrauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 3, 15 January 1920.

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–8–

Women’s Local Politics

With lovely generosity, she was always willing to put her art of singing intothe service of party meetings; giving joy to others was for her a necessity oflife.

From the obituary for a member of the DNVP women’s group in Stettin (October 1932)1

What activities did women develop at the grass-roots level, and how did theseactivities reflect the themes of the women who were active at the national level?According to Helen Boak, women in local politics were confined to doing the“dirty work,” such as collecting dues, conducting door-to-door propaganda, anddoing low-level administrative jobs. Their thankless work won women the ritualpraise of the male party leaders but no political influence, as Boak confirms byusing statistics that show women’s representation in political assembliesbecoming smaller proportionally to the size of their town or village.2 There isdefinitely much truth to this picture: women often picked up membership duesat the door – not a pleasant job given the notoriously bad payment discipline ofbourgeois party members. During the inflation, dues were sometimes collectedin foodstuffs in rural areas, which demanded heavy physical work at a time whenfew people were motorized. Handing out party leaflets on the streets could bedangerous in regions where violence-prone leftists or, later on, Nazis dominatedthe scene. Yet, the picture emerging from available local party newsletters fromEast Elbian regions, Schleswig-Holstein, Westphalia, and Berlin is richer thanthe emphasis on the “dirty work” suggests. Women in many places developed anintense activism in the DNVP as well as the DVP. As they frequently claimed,they aimed to promote the feeling of “home” and “family” within the local partyorganization – thus extending their roles as mothers and housewives to the party.They were often responsible for party festivities, made coffee and baked cake,and performed as singers, musicians, or actresses. Women also used many ofthese festivities to raise funds for the party, for example by setting up lotteries.Another mainstay of local women’s activities was providing social services forthe poor – usually party members: women set up soup kitchens, distributed gifts,and organized rural holidays for poor city dwellers. Women from both parties

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also tried hard to improve the political training of local women. In cooperationwith the national women leaders, they offered lectures on political and socialissues as well as workshops on speech-making and political organization.

In the district of Lauban, a city in Western Silesia, for example, a districtwomen’s committee of the DNVP had been formed early on but faltered after thedeath of its chairwoman in early 1921. A year later, the DNVP district organiza-tion revived the women’s committee by inviting female party members to a cele-bration of the Kaiser’s birthday (27 January). In a keynote address, district secre-tary Otto Mießner commemorated the Kaiser and praised the monarchy. Whenhe explained why he had chosen the Kaiser’s birthday for the assembly, hepointed out: “The German woman has always been a loyal stalwart of traditionand a priestess of German loyalty. If we add to this the truly female ability tocommiserate deeply, then we have the foundations on which today’s celebrationrests.”3 The women’s committee constituted itself under a new chairwoman, andMießner joined its board, which was not unusual because local women’s commit-tees often invited men to make it clear that they pursued no selfish women’s poli-cies. The committee published a declaration in favor of monarchism and therestoration of everything “good” that the Revolution had destroyed; the leadersof the women’s committee participated in the women’s meeting preceding theDNVP’s national conference in nearby Görlitz in October 1922. The chairwomansummarized the meeting in the local party newsletter and led a discussion of theissues raised in Görlitz, particularly the reform of divorce legislation.4 Butwomen in the Lauban district were often most active in places where no women’scommittee existed, and the wisdom of forming women’s committees was notrecognized everywhere. Frequently the heavy workload of rural women was anargument against forming a women’s committee, even if many women did attendthe local party gatherings.5

Women were also active in mixed party meetings and committees. The newsbulletins of local party assemblies in the Lauban district frequently mention astrong presence of women, and many women were elected to party offices. At ameeting of the local party committee of the city of Lauban in August 1921,twenty-three board members were elected for the six city subdistricts, includingeleven women. But the almost perfect numerical equality is misleading. Thecontext shows that all the men were elected as chair or vice chair of the sub-district boards, whereas the women’s responsibility was defined as “strict organ-ization, collection of dues, etc.”6 Other incidents confirm that women wereprimarily responsible for the collection of membership dues, delivered mostly ingoods and foodstuffs in 1922–23, and the organization of social events, duringwhich they provided coffee and cake and stage entertainment. Women also madegifts to the party or imparted money from their inheritance to it. They supportedthe party’s charitable and welfare activities, such as funding for a local nurse and

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the collection of food for poor party members. The wealthy widow of a Germanofficer killed in German East Africa was such a generous contributor and activefund-raiser that the local party newsletter honored her with an article about herown activities in East Africa.7

Women’s efforts to promote the feeling of the party as a big family receivedsupport from party secretary Mießner, who during social events occasionallyplayed a piano solo or accompanied his wife, a singer. In 1921–23 the local partypublished its own newsletter, which gave much space to family news, such asweddings and obituaries of party members. The local DNVP also supported adaily newspaper sympathetic to its views, and it was due to women’s financialsupport that this newspaper once avoided bankruptcy.8 In contrast to mostnational leaders, a majority of the active women were married – frequently tomen from the party. Although the region was famous for a strong presence of theDNVP’s worker group (Deutschnationaler Arbeiterbund), most of the activewomen belonged to the nobility or were married to white-collar employees orindependent tradesmen. The activities of the DNVP women in the Laubandistrict focused on local concerns. Except for the report on the RFA meeting inGörlitz and a letter by Paula Mueller-Otfried to a local party member (publishedin the party newsletter), traces of the concerns expressed by the nationally activewomen of the DNVP are hard to find.9 This may be due to the weakness of thedistrict women’s committee, which even after its restoration did not developimpressive activities, or to limited documentation: the party newsletter faltered,like many others, during the inflation in 1923.

In Soldin, a city and district east of Frankfurt an der Oder, the women’scommittee left better traces, and the local party newsletter published much moreabout the DNVP’s national women’s politics. The district women’s committeehad connections to the RFA, which organized a political training workshop inFrankfurt an der Oder in 1920.10 In April and November 1922 Margarethe Behmgave talks to the women’s committee, in which she appealed to women to informthemselves about politics and to attack Versailles, which she called the cause ofall misery in Germany.11 In July 1924 the district women’s committee organizeda rally against Versailles, stressing that only a Germany reconstituted as a greatpower would become a force for peace in Europe, and in October a woman fromthe district women’s committee gave an address to the regional party assembly inKüstrin, where she stressed the special role of women in reconciling the partyafter its Reichstag group had split during the vote on the Dawes Plan.12 Until1930, when the party newsletter stopped appearing, the women’s districtcommittee displayed continuous activity in contact with the women leaders inBerlin. Elisabeth Spohr repeatedly appeared on the DNVP’s district ballot for thePrussian Landtag elections, and RFA chairs Behm and Lehmann had good rela-tions with women on the Soldin district committee.

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Close connections to the RFA were typical also for women’s groups in twodistricts of the Prussian province of Pomerania: Stolp, in the easternmost tip ofthe province (just northwest of Danzig), and Stettin, the port city on the mouthof the Oder River. Both districts benefited from the frequent visits of Ilse-Charlotte Noack, who sat in the Prussian Landtag from 1921 to 1932 anddevoted much energy to building up a powerful women’s structure in theseDNVP strongholds. As in Lauban, women in Stolp organized coffee parties(Kaffeekränzchen) with political speeches, music, poems, and short patrioticplays. The homemade cakes received as much praise as in Lauban, but thefocus on the speeches was stronger. The audience was usually female. Most ofthe women’s activities here happened in women’s committees built up on theinitiative of Noack. As in Lauban, wealthy women, often nobles, were mostactive in the women’s committees. They organized food distributions to poorregions and established a foundation for free lunches for the poor (“deutschna-tionaler Mittagsdank”). A girls’ section of the Bismarckbund, the DNVP’syouth organization, effectively supported the DNVP women’s social activi-ties.13 A similar picture emerges from the newsletter for the district of Stettin,the capital of Pomerania, published 1925–32. Noack’s activities here werepowerfully assisted by Lotte Plath, a DNVP representative in the Pomeranianprovincial diet and contributor to the Frauenkorrespondenz. The women’scommittee organized political talks, social events, and “women’s afternoons”(Frauennachmittage) with discussion rounds on specific topics. They alsogathered for the commemoration ceremonies on the Kaiser’s birthday, theQueen Luise day, and the memorial days of Auguste Viktoria. The districtwomen’s committee took up some issues debated by the national womenleaders such as public morality, women’s role in provincial and communal poli-tics, divorce legislation, and women’s standing in the professions. The localDNVP newsletter reprinted articles from the Frauenkorrespondenz and evenpublished reviews of books from women leaders of other parties. The DNVPwomen in the district of Stettin were also active in supporting their party’spolitical agenda, particularly during the presidential elections of 1925 and thecampaign for a plebiscite on the dissolution of the Prussian Landtag in 1931.Welfare activities also belonged to their main concerns. They collected coaland potatoes for the poor, who could sign up for free distribution during thewinter, and in 1931 they organized a concert for the DNVP winter aid founda-tion.14 In Stolp and Stettin, where a good structure of women’s committeesexisted, most of the women’s local activities seem to have taken place inconnection with those committees.

Exceptionally rich documentation exists for East Prussia, Germany’s exclaveon the Baltic, for 1920–22. Therese Deutsch, member of the Prussian Landtagfrom 1921 to 1932 (with the exception of a few months in 1928), and Else von

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Sperber, Reichstag representative from May 1924 to 1928, were particularlyactive here. Deutsch pioneered the development of the regional women’s struc-ture of the DNVP in 1919–21. She was the secretary of the East Prussianwomen’s committee, which had an equally diligent deputy secretary, Clotilde vonder Groeben. Deutsch and von der Groeben traveled through the countryside,gave talks, and initiated the establishment of many local women’s committees.Both were effective and well-liked speakers who often drew an audience of fivehundred people even in small villages.15 In their speeches, they elaborated on therights and duties of the newly enfranchised women and stressed their responsi-bility as educators to work for the dissemination of a religious and patrioticspirit.16 In many places, DNVP women forming a women’s committee alsoinspired the growth of DNVP youth groups. The Volksgemeinschaft idea wasparticularly strong in this isolated area, where many from the lower classes,notably the rural workers, voted for the DNVP. The social engagement of thewomen thus assumed special importance. In the winter of 1920 the women’scommittee from Königsberg, the capital, organized farm holidays for 137 poorchildren and forty-six adults from their city, so as to bridge the gap between townand country. The same women’s committee also saw to it that wealthier DNVPmembers let poor women affiliated with the party repair their clothes and linens.Women’s committees organized lotteries to benefit poor party members andorganized food collections for Germans in Upper Silesia, another area whereGermans felt threatened by Poland.17

Social events and political training also figured among the activities of theEast Prussian DNVP women. The Christmas parties of the Königsberg women’scommittee with their “living pictures” (stehende Bilder) of patriotic scenes werefamous. In June 1921 the women’s committee in Sensburg, a district city in thesouth of the province, invited party members to attend a party meeting in folkdress and to participate in a lottery for the treasury of the local party organiza-tion. The women sold eight thousand lottery tickets; wealthy party membersdonated the prizes. The local DNVP newsletter advertised these successfulfestivities as a model to the whole party.18 To benefit the political education ofwomen, the women’s committees organized courses for female speakers; testspeeches could be given on such topics as: “The war-guilt lie”, “What does itmean to be a German?”, and “Antagonisms between town and country.”19

Women’s committees were interested in national issues (particularly the legisla-tion on abortion, the status of midwives, and school reform), and the LFA organ-ized a series of speeches on such topics. Deutsch and other well-known DNVPwomen offered “office hours” in Königsberg to discuss new bills with partymembers.20 They fostered contacts with the Danzig women’s group under AnniKalähne, which regularly organized meetings attended by women from all EastGerman regions.

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The DNVP women in East Prussia were enormously active in the early 1920s,but they were even more critical of engagement for women’s rights per se thanthe national leaders. Many East Prussian DNVP women criticized the women’srights movement as anti-national and selfish.21 In an article on women’s repre-sentation in parliaments, von der Groeben argued that male deputies in mostfields represented women well and that the real women’s questions were insepa-rable from the well-being of the people. She thought that only a few DNVPwomen should sit in parliament – primarily to advise men on women’s questionsand to check the influence of women from parties with a worldview hostile to theDNVP. Von der Groeben wanted only those women to sit in parliaments whorepresented women’s “true” professions (housewives, mothers, nurses, andeducators), but not women motivated by a general political interest, such asSchirmacher.22 The party newsletter printed lengthy articles by women againstthe right of women to sit on juries and to become judges; here the East Prussianwomen’s committees opposed the women in the DNVP Reichstag group. WithDeutsch and von Sperber, the East Prussian DNVP women had a PrussianLandtag and a Reichstag representative for some time, but the fact that theDNVP group in the provincial diet for East Prussia consisted of twenty-eightmen but no woman in 1921 did not seem to bother them.23 Clara Papendieck, thechair of the East Prussian women’s committee in late 1920, summarized theirpriorities best when she defined the woman as the guardian of three pearls fallenfrom the crown of the beloved empress: family, church, and fatherland.24

Notable activism of DNVP women can also be traced in Westphalia, wheremany women’s committees had been formed. Women in this area appear to havedone a particularly large share of the thankless party work, such as fund-raisingand distributing propaganda for meetings. A report on a meeting of members ofthe local DNVP group in the town of Bückeburg, for example, praises the womenfor having ensured that the meeting hall was full. At the end of the meeting, awoman asked for donations for people from the Ruhr district, then under Franco-Belgian occupation.25 The memoirs of Anni Kalähne, the chair of Danzig’swomen’s committee and member of the Volkstag, confirm many aspects visiblein party newsletters. Kalähne stressed the social activities of the Danzig women’scommittee; it encouraged farmers to send monthly packages with foodstuffs topoor rentiers, sent city children to the countryside for vacations, and collectedeggs, potatoes, and clothes for distribution to the poor. Kalähne mentioned thatshe had not much sympathy for women’s rights although she often experiencedthe condescending attitude of male city officials toward politically activewomen.26

Berlin, where women’s activities in several local party sections are well docu-mented, differs from the more provincial or rural districts. Here the DNVP’sentire local activity, not only the “dirty work,” relied on women. For the district

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of Berlin-Northwest (approximately today’s Moabit section), a unique sourceexists that offers numerical information on local party membership: fromFebruary 1919 to March 1920 the local party newsletter published the names ofnew party members. Of 2,518 new members, the sex could be determined in2,435 cases. In this group, there were 1,515 women, who constitute 62.2 percentof the members whose sex is identifiable. Unmarried women (649) were stronglyrepresented and almost equal in numbers to married women (709). Of 157women the marital status could not be detected. Unfortunately, the lists give theprofessions of only 158 women, although it is highly probable that in this urbanenvironment a large portion of both unmarried and married women wereworking. Among the women whose occupation is given, two groups predomi-nate: sisters belonging to religious orders (62) and teachers (56).27 The strengthof the first occupation was due to the existence of a house of a religious women’sorder in the district, whereas women teachers belonged to the politically mostactive professional groups in all bourgeois parties. A social profile of the womenin the local DNVP is difficult to establish, but there certainly was a mixture ofupper-class women (mostly nobles or independently wealthy women), womenwith academic backgrounds, women from white-collar professions, and lower-class women, particularly domestic employees. The latter were well organizedand politically very active in Berlin.28

Other sources confirm that women joined the DNVP’s Berlin-Northwestgroup in great numbers. At the end of May 1919, for example, the local DNVPnewsletter reported about a DNVP protest meeting against the Treaty ofVersailles. The meeting was disturbed by the heckling of young men from theIndependent Socialists, whereupon the attending DNVP members yelled back atthem, stood up on the benches, and climbed on the podium to better refute thehecklers. The newsletter report insisted that the behavior of the party membershad exacerbated the chaos and made it impossible for the trained speaker toeffectively rebut the hecklers. The author thus admonished party members toretain discipline in such situations, admitting that “this may be particularly hardfor the newcomers in politics, our women, who are more easily carried away bytheir feelings than the men.” It turns out that the vast majority of the DNVPmembers present were female party members. The report thus concluded: “Bythe way, the rioters would have been less bold had more of our male partymembers been present.”29

Complaints that few men participated in the DNVP’s Berlin sections appearfrequently in the local party publications. At a party assembly in Berlin-Northwest the chairman complained that the majority of the audience wasfemale. “But how shall our fatherland recover if our best men remain passive?”30

An article of the DNVP newsletter in the same district thanked women inDecember 1919 for their work as helpers of the party. They had diligently visited

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party members, distributed propaganda, handed out ballots, collected member-ship fees, and tackled administrative tasks. “Unfortunately there are only a fewmale helpers. In this respect, too, women embarrass us, the men … Whoeverknows how much a woman of the character we respect dislikes working in publicand approaching people who she does not know will understand the magnitudeof the sacrifice that these female helpers make for our cause.”31 The comparativepassivity of men showed even in the “German National Chorus,” which wasfounded by party members but was restricted in its repertoire by its dramaticshortage of tenors and basses. Some articles scornfully reproached the men fornot taking part more enthusiastically in the paramilitary home guards set up as amiddle-class defense against worker unrest and asked why women did not pres-sure their husbands harder to join these units, an exhortation that must have madelittle sense to the many unmarried women in the party.32

Some activities of the Berlin women resembled those of DNVP women insmall towns and rural areas.33 Train rides and boat excursions to idyllic placesaround Berlin were standard fare of women’s committees in every section oftown. So were charitable activities. Party women, for example, signed up asguardians for orphans.34 Women’s committees also gathered donations for distri-bution as Christmas gifts to poor party members in 1923. But demand soonoutgrew the readiness to help: when some women asked the party for free pota-toes and for help in finding cheap rooms, the LFA Berlin stated that it was, afterall, a political organization and had no resources for such services (although foodwas later distributed to poor party members by the DNVP women’s committeesin Stettin and Danzig).35 Women’s engagement for the social events of the localparty, moreover, was less important in Berlin than in the other areas, maybebecause far more unmarried women belonged to the party than in rural or small-town districts. Party meetings thus were not the “family affair” that they mighthave been in places where husband and wife both belonged to the DNVP. Bycontrast, the intellectual activities of the Berlin women’s committees were morechallenging and vibrant than those of the other districts. Berlin benefited fromthe presence of Reichstag and Prussian Landtag members as well as the head-quarters of the RFA. There was never a lack of female speakers. District women’scommittees put on a rich fare of lectures and workshops on all the topics relevantto the national women’s leaders and female parliamentarians, and the partynewsletters provided information on most of them. Unlike in the countryside,issues of interest to professional women, who made up a large part of the urbanparty membership, received much attention. In 1923 the LFA Berlin also organ-ized a series of lectures and workshops on public speaking, which was offeredwith success in several Berlin districts.36

Women in the Berlin DNVP were much better represented in the local assem-blies (the city parliament and the district assemblies) than their party colleagues

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elsewhere, although they were still dramatically underrepresented if oneconsiders the probable strength of female party membership and the degree ofwomen’s engagement for the party. But the Berlin DNVP counted in its rows anumber of well-known women politicians. Asta Rötger, Gertrud Becker,Margarethe Braunert, and Else Ulbrich were active and influential in the cityparliament (Ulbrich later moved to the Landtag), whereas Minna Hölzel, a repre-sentative of domestic employees, was most notable in the assembly of thewealthy Tiergarten district. Although professional women probably played animportant role in sustaining the Berlin DNVP’s activity, housewives also figuredprominently on the ballots and in the assemblies.37 Rötger, a housewife herself,became her party’s foremost expert on local politics. In 1929 she summarized herexperience in the Berlin city parliament, expressing longing for the “good olddays” before 1918, when a few male notables managed city politics. In typicalfashion, she blamed the Left for having introduced partisan politics intocommunal politics, implying that the old city fathers, all from a socially exclu-sive group, had stood above it.38

In late 1930, the RFA of the DNVP sent out a questionnaire to the regionalwomen’s committees to gauge the level of women’s activity after party splits hadoccurred earlier in the year. Selective results were published in DieDeutschnationale Frau throughout the spring and summer of 1931, but theircelebratory message belies their informative value. Nevertheless, the kind ofwomen’s activities mentioned in these reports confirms the picture emergingfrom local newsletters. Strong activism seems to have persisted mostly in thoseareas where the DNVP was strong, such as Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Danzig,and some areas of Württemberg. All regional women’s committees claimed thatmost women in the party had remained loyal to Hugenberg, the radical partychairman elected in 1928, although a few admitted having had difficulties. Togain a more detailed picture of the situation, the RFA chair Annagrete Lehmannvisited women’s committees in thirteen Reichstag districts in the summer of1931. Although her report was generally positive, she gained the impression thatin several regions the men in the DNVP did not adequately support the activitiesof the women’s committees. She stressed that women have to make their influ-ence felt not simply through numbers but also qualitatively, by contributing to theparty in their own “womanly” way. She praised several fund-raising efforts bywomen’s committees but urged the women to do more word-of-mouth propa-ganda and daily small work for the party – the “dirty work.”39

Good documentation for the local politics of DVP women exists mostly forSchleswig-Holstein, East Prussia, and Berlin. In Schleswig-Holstein, at the timestill a province of Prussia, the DVP women’s organization got a good startthrough the lively participation of women in the campaign for the plebiscite inthe German-Danish border region (March 1920).40 Jane Voigt, who coordinated

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much of that activity, became famous in the process and was elected to thePrussian Landtag a year later. Very active also were the DVP women fromAltona, now a suburb of Hamburg but in the 1920s an independent city and partof Schleswig-Holstein. Elisabeth Cimbal, a housewife from Altona, was theengine of the women’s activities and acted as chair of the WkFA Schleswig-Holstein. Clara Mende helped the activities of Schleswig-Holstein’s DVP womenthrough lectures in front of party assemblies and women’s committees.41 Unlikethe DNVP women in East Prussia, the DVP women of Schleswig-Holsteinbelieved that women had to be represented in the party and in political assem-blies in greater numbers. At a women’s conference of the DVP in February 1921,Cimbal argued that women could be particularly effective in instilling familieswith DVP ideology. But to interest them in party work, the DVP had to invite atleast one female speaker to its conferences. Cimbal further argued that too manytasks were waiting in local politics that women could tackle better than men;women should thus press for better representation in all local party offices andassemblies.42 The efforts for better representation appear to have beensuccessful. In the by-elections to the DVP board of the province in early 1921,for example, four women (and no men) were elected.43 The pressure for betterrepresentation of women, however, was always accompanied by the assurancethat women would only work for the best of the nation or party and not pursueany particularistic goals. In 1922 Cimbal reported: “The women’s rights aspectis completely missing from the work of women in the women’s committees. Tostress it would in my opinion be a mistake, even though we, the women, of coursehave the duty to help our sisters as much as possible and to limit injustice; yetthe work of women within the party is not meant to advance specific women’sinterests but to contribute to the common good.”44

Although the representation of women in the Schleswig-Holstein DVP appearsto have been good in comparison to that in other areas, occasional complaintssurfaced regarding the tendency of men to elect women to unimportant commit-tees. Lisbeth Haas, an expert on communal politics, criticized the fact that in onetown assembly a woman had been elected to a bath committee, even though nobaths existed, and that men before important meetings often informed womenpoorly.45 In the fall of 1922, Cimbal drew pessimistic conclusions about women’swork in the Schleswig-Holstein DVP, even though she admitted that it had reachedan intensity rivaled by DVP women in few other provinces. She complained thatprejudice against women in politics was still widespread among women and men– except during election campaigns, where women helped diligently. Cimbaldecried the limits thus placed on women’s political activity because she consid-ered women as the natural bearers of the idea of a movement – implying thatwithout their engagement the DVP would become too much of an interest groupand would lose its idealistic aspect. She also argued that a woman without polit-

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ical education could no longer be a true partner to her husband and a responsibleparent, because all aspects of life had become politicized.46

The activities of the DVP women in Schleswig-Holstein focused on charityand the political education of women. Help for poor rentiers was the main focusof their charitable work,47 and they also participated in programs to allow chil-dren from the occupied areas to spend their vacations in Schleswig-Holstein;four hundred children had thus been served in 1921.48 For their political educa-tion, DVP women found ways that spoke for the greater open-mindedness of theDVP in comparison to the DNVP. In Flensburg, women formed a reading circle;they read newspapers from the entire political spectrum and then discussed thedifferent viewpoints of all parties. In Altona, members of the women’s committeeattended rallies of other parties and discussed their insights.49 Altogether,Schleswig-Holstein saw successful activity by women in the DVP, in spite of thedeficits mentioned above. The intensity of women’s work in the Schleswig-Holstein DVP was unique, at least in comparison to other provinces. Only inBerlin did women’s activities assume a similar dynamic, but Berlin was a muchsmaller and more concentrated political area than Schleswig-Holstein.50 Thestrong female representation in the party offices of the Schleswig-Holstein DVPalso reflected on the engagement of a dedicated group of women. These womenwere in touch with all the topics of concern to the national DVP women leaders,particularly the fate of Germans in occupied and lost territories and issuesregarding motherhood and marriage, on which the DVP’s legal expert AnnaMayer gave frequent talks and seminars in Schleswig-Holstein. The DVPnewsletter for the province gave much room to women’s issues and reprintedarticles from the women’s section of the DVP-Nachrichtenblatt. Unfortunatelythe newsletter, like so many others, faltered during the inflation, and activities ofwomen in the province are thus hard to follow after 1923.

In East Prussia, the DVP women’s work was encouraged by two nationallyknown women: Margarethe Poehlmann, member of the Prussian Landtag from1919 to her death in December 1923, and Milka Fritsch, member of theReichstag from March 1923 to May 1924. Like Deutsch and von Groeben for theDNVP, Poehlmann and Fritsch made lecture tours through the province toencourage the buildup of women’s committees. Women from the DVP, like thelocal DNVP women, were also active in building up the party’s youth groups.But their work was less political than that in Schleswig-Holstein and morefocused on social events and charity. In a report of its activities, the Königsbergwomen’s committee in 1920 praised its own efforts to mobilize women, but allactivities it mentioned had to do with social events and charity; women had, forexample, produced clothes for the children of poor families.51 Characteristic wasa report summarizing one of many “tea evenings” of the Königsberg committee:after a heartfelt welcome speech by the chairwoman of the women’s committee,

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a patriotic play, titled “Disarmed Germania,” was performed. The play’s messageconcerned the value of work for the nation. To state the point more clearly andto represent the Volksgemeinschaft of work, people in various professionalclothes surrounded the stage during the performance. A piano recital of works byChopin, Brahms, and Schumann followed, children with flowers danced, andthen the guests were invited to the rich buffet grouped around a show of the chil-dren’s clothes made by the women’s committee. The commentary in the localDVP newsletter said: “With this event the women’s group has shown once againthat art, work, and social enjoyment can go hand in hand with politics.”52

Similar events are reported from smaller towns. But despite the generousefforts of Poehlmann and Fritsch the women’s work of the DVP got a slow startin comparison to that in Schleswig-Holstein and the DNVP’s efforts in EastPrussia. Only in late 1920 did a DVP women’s committee for East Prussiaformally constitute itself. At this time only fifteen local women’s committeesexisted in the entire province.53 More activity was reported from Westphalia in1920: In the district of Hameln the women had divided themselves among the tenelectoral subdistricts (ten women for each) and distributed ballots and propa-ganda leaflets according to a general plan. Women, moreover, had done secre-tarial work in the DVP’s campaign office and carried out much propaganda workfor the party. The DVP advertised the Westphalian women’s committee as amodel for women’s engagement in the party.54 In Hamburg, another activewomen’s committee existed that put much emphasis on social events in additionto the monthly political meetings. Dr. Olga Herschel, member of the localwomen’s committee, stressed that women had to get used to being in a party, andshe hoped that social events would give the “party Moloch” a gentle and humanface. Women from the committee visited plays together or organized a Christmasparty for children. Herschel suggested: “Should it not be the most noble duty ofthe woman to insert the female aspect of joy into the busy treadmill of partylife?”55

The Berlin women’s organization of the DVP, like its counterpart in theDNVP, developed an unusually intense activity. An inquiry of 1930 showed thatnowhere else at the time was the ratio of DVP women’s committees to localparty groups as high as in Berlin.56 The DVP women were engaged in an above-party organization focusing on women’s issues, the Political Cooperative of theWomen of Greater Berlin (Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Frauen von Groß-Berlin). The DVP women’s committees of the three electoral districts of GreaterBerlin (including Potsdam and many suburbs) also cooperated intensely.57 In1919 they merged many of their functions under the leadership of Dr. IlseSzagunn, a physician from Berlin-Charlottenburg.58 The relatively small size ofthese three densely populated districts and the good public transportationsystem made such cooperation feasible. Not only did they lower costs by partly

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merging their functions, the three Greater Berlin women’s committees also madewidely praised attempts to finance their activities through auctions of self-produced art and Christmas decorations.59 Drawing on the presence of theparty’s most distinguished women (members of the Reichstag and the PrussianLandtag), the Greater Berlin women organized workshops on the full range ofissues relevant to the national women leaders.60 They also did social and chari-table work by holding office hours for people in economic difficulties, offeringfree lunches to rentiers, listing open jobs, and sending city children to the coun-tryside for vacations. They seem to have given the social side of their activity alittle less emphasis than their local counterparts from the DNVP, but they oftenundertook instructive excursions informed by maternalist concerns, such as a tripto the milk distribution center in Berlin-Weissensee.61 In 1924 they started theirmost famous initiative, the Mother’s Aid Wandering Basket (MütterhilfeWanderkorb), which amounted to the lending out of baskets with items necessaryfor the raising of small children. Mothers with newborns could borrow withoutcharge a package containing everything from baby bottle to stroller. The initia-tive quickly became so famous that the DVP opened an exhibition on it. The DVPwomen set up lotteries for its benefit, and the Mütterhilfe Wanderkorb wasquickly expanded.62 Patriotic festivities also figured among the activities of theDVP women in Greater Berlin: they organized their share of memorial events forQueen Luise, Auguste Viktoria, and Bismarck. In 1925, they rented the PrussianState Opera House for a celebration of a millennium of Rhineland history thatfeatured “living pictures,” recitals, and music – in short, all the nationalist kitschtypical for provincial DNVP events.63 The engagement for women’s rightsplayed a subordinate role in the women’s committees of Greater Berlin. AlthoughSzagunn, in the name of the three Greater Berlin women’s committees,demanded at the first national party conference in 1919 that women’s rights inthe social sphere be widened, she immediately stressed that these rights wereonly meant to allow women to take over more duties.64 Later, she pointed out thatthe Greater Berlin women wanted to complement men’s activities in the party butstressed that the women’s work was by no means directed against the men.Instead, she envisioned organic cooperation; in some places the activity of thewomen’s committees had been so successful already that she claimed there wasno need any more for separate women’s committees.65

The social composition of women active in Greater Berlin’s DVP is harder toestablish than for the DNVP. But as in the DNVP, housewives and professionalwomen (teachers, nurses, shop assistants) figured strongly among the local-election candidates of the DVP.66 Berlin’s DVP women did have a comparativelygood representation in assemblies and on party boards, but there was a steepdecline after 1929. They occasionally complained about insufficient representa-tion, but they also criticized the disinterest of local women in city politics –

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although more women than men seem to have voted for the DVP in Berlin as wellas in the nation at large.67 Regardless of the more spectacular initiatives, such asthe Mütterhilfe Wanderkorb, much of women’s local activity happened incon-spicuously. Anni Klingspor, for example, chair of the Berlin WkFA and secondvice chair of the DVP in Berlin, was not much noted until she died in 1926 andreceived her obituary in the local party newsletter. Klingspor, so it said, haddisplayed the best womanly qualities and worked quietly and self-sacrificinglyfor the party and the poor.68

What do these local studies suggest for the work of DVP and DNVP womenon the state and Reich level? First, the communication between women at thelocal level and the national women leaders of both parties was largely dependenton the personal engagement of prominent women from the center. In Berlin, thiscommunication was very good, but this was not true for some rural districts,although nationally known women representatives, such as Mende, Matz, Behm,and Lehmann, took extensive lecture tours even outside their election districtsand beyond election time. In the DNVP, every regional and local group wasrequired to subscribe to the newsletter of the RFA, but in February 1932 a DNVPcircular complained that some women’s committees had still not complied.61 Itis noteworthy that the local activities of women did not always take place inconnection with the district or local women’s committees. Although manywomen’s committees at least at the district level existed in most places examined,women were sometimes very active even without a local women’s committee.The efforts of both RFAs to train women politically, however, depended on astrong women’s structure or the frequent presence of leading party women. Thereading circles of the DVP women in Schleswig-Holstein, the intellectually chal-lenging lectures of both parties in Berlin, and the speakers’ courses of the DNVPin East Prussia were impressive achievements, but other local women’s groupsseem to have done very little for the political education of women. The RFAs ofboth parties often complained about a lack of trained speakers – particularly inthe early and late years of the Weimar Republic.70

Regarding the contents of women’s local activity, it becomes clear that womenwere instrumental in fostering an intense club culture (Vereinskultur) with avariety of social events. In urban areas, this club culture appears to have beenmore gender-segregated than in rural regions, where the party was often a familyaffair. In general, women on the local level cooperated more intensely with themen of the party than did the national women’s leadership of the parties. Thewomen in the DVP’s provincial organizations strongly encouraged male partici-pation in women’s committees, and women from both parties were just as eagerto organize festivities for women alone as for mixed party groups. A tellingexample of inconsistent separation was a DNVP women’s committee meeting ina little Westphalian town: the women invited a male speaker for a lecture but took

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out their embroidery and discussed their work for the party after the speaker hadleft.71 Whether the specific women’s events were more frugal than the men’sevents, as Nancy Reagin has observed in prewar Hanover, cannot be substanti-ated, except if one wants to read much (too much?) into the names of meetingplaces of a Berlin DVP district group: whereas the men met at the hotelJägerheim (Hunter’s Lodge) for their Stammtisch, the women’s committee heldits meetings in the café Rotkäppchen (Red Riding Hood).72 Social welfare andcharity work were important in every case study – often in connection with thewomen’s work for the party’s club culture. This probably came out of the tradi-tional social engagement of women, which the First World War had powerfullyreaffirmed, and it mirrored the activities of the leading women in the two partiesin the Reichstag and the state parliaments. It also harkened back to the wide-spread idea among bourgeois women that their new political rights implied asocial duty.

Almost all local women’s activities reflected the notion of different genderroles. Women took over primarily supportive or maternal roles, be it throughcooking and baking or through initiatives such as the Mütterhilfe Wanderkorb.True to their maternalist vision of their own political role, these womenconceived of the party as a home and family in which they would play the roleof the housewife and mother in a broad sense. Contrary to the teachings ofHelene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, the notion of different gender roles was notconnected to equal rights demands, which played a subordinate role almosteverywhere. There can be no question that the leading women from both partiesfelt next to no grass-roots pressure to pursue women’s rights issues, exceptmaybe in relation to the specific interests of some professional women in urbancenters. Many rural areas even restrained the leading women’s temptation toconsider women’s rights more directly, as the attitudes of the DNVP women fromEast Prussia demonstrate. When a DVP guideline for women speakers warnedthat women’s rights issues should be avoided in front of rural audiences, itreflected a similar state of affairs in the DVP, whose women were more“tempted” than DNVP women to raise such issues.73

Notes

1. Nachrichtenblatt des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins Stettin 8, October1932.

2. Boak, “Women in Weimar Politics,” pp. 374–5 and 389.3. “Zum 27. Januar,” Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei des

Kreisvereins Lauban 2, no. 2, February 1922.4. “Aus dem Vereinsleben,” Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei

des Kreisvereins Lauban 2, no. 10, December 1922.

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5. “Aus unseren Ortsgruppen,” Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volksparteides Kreisvereins Lauban 3, nos. 4–5, April–May 1923.

6. “Aus unseren Ortsgruppen,” Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volksparteides Kreisvereins Lauban 1, no. 3, August 1921.

7. “Etwas von Frau von Prince,” Nachrichten der DeutschnationalenVolkspartei des Kreisvereins Lauban 2, no. 2, February 1922.

8. Ortsgruppe Lauban, Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei desKreisvereins Lauban vol. 2, no. 8, October 1922, p. 39.

9. See Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Die Aufgaben der deutschen Frau,”Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei des Kreisvereins Lauban,vol. 3, nos. 4–5, April–May 1923.

10. “Politische Lehrgänge für Frauen,” Monatsmitteilungen für dieVertrauensmänner und Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen VolksparteiKreisverein Soldin 2, no. 8, 31 August 1920.

11. “Vortrag Margarethe Behm,” in: Monatsmitteilungen für die Vertrauens-männer und Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei KreisvereinSoldin 4, no. 3, 31 March 1922, and “Margarethe Behm. DeutschnationaleFrauenversammlung am 1. November 1922,” Monatsmitteilungen für dieVertrauensmänner und Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen VolksparteiKreisverein Soldin 4, no. 10, 1 November 1922.

12. “Los von Versailles! Deutsche Schwestern!” Monatsmitteilungen für dieVertrauensmänner und Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen VolksparteiKreisverein Soldin 6, no. 6, 6 July 1924, and “Landesparteitag derDeutschnationalen Volkspartei in Cüstrin-Neustadt am 18. und 19. Oktober1924,” Monatsmitteilungen für die Vertrauensmänner und Mitglieder derDeutschnationalen Volkspartei Kreisverein Soldin 6, no. 10, 31 October1924.

13. Alfred Schacht, “Zehn Jahre Kreisverein,” Deutschnationale Blätter(Kreisverein Stolp) 9, no. 2, April–May 1929.

14. “Bekanntmachungen,” Nachrichtenblatt des Deutschnationalen Volks-vereins Stettin 1, no. 14, 16 October 1925. See also vol. 7, December 1931.

15. Der Parteifreund. Amtliches Blatt der deutschnationalen Volkspartei,Landesverband Ostpreußen, 1, no. 13, 17 August 1920.

16. See for example Der Parteifreund. Amtliches Blatt der deutschnationalenVolkspartei, Landesverband Ostpreußen 1, no. 13, 17 August 1920.

17. Lilli Karge, “Landaufenthalt unserer Kinder,” Der Parteifreund, nos. 32–3,23 December 1920, and “Gründung der Frauengruppe der Dnat. Vp. inKönigsberg,” Der Parteifreund 2, no. 7, 17 February 1921. See also DerParteifreund 2, no. 30, 28 July 1921, which also mentions the food collec-tions for Upper Silesia.

18. Der Parteifreund 2, no. 26, 30 June 1921.

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19. Der Parteifreund 3, nos. 11–12, 25 March 1922.20. Der Parteifreund 2, nos. 45–6, 20 November 1921, and vol. 3, no. 4, 28

January 1922.21. “Erziehungsfragen” (three parts), Der Parteifreund 1, nos. 27–9, 11, 18, and

25 November 1920, “Über weibliche Laien- und Berufsrichter,” DerParteifreund 2, no. 25, 23 June 1921, and “Deutsches Recht und deutscheFrauen,” Der Parteifreund 2, nos. 40–1, 16 October 1921.

22. Clotilde von der Groeben, “Frauenvertretung in den Parlamenten,” DerParteifreund 2, no. 11, 17 March 1921.

23. Der Parteifreund 2, no. 10, 10 March 1921.24. “Kaiserin-Geburtstagsfeier in Cranz,” Der Parteifreund 1, no. 26, 4

November 1920.25. Nachrichten aus dem Landesverband Westfalen-Ost der DNVP 2, no. 5, 1

May 1923.26. Anni Kalähne, “Lebenserinnerungen,” in Staatsarchiv Bremen, Nachlass

Dietrich Schäfer, vol. 7.21 (not paginated). See also Anni Kalähne, “LFADanzig,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 9, 1 August 1931.

27. I thank my research assistant Kerry West, who in October 1998 tabulated thenumbers from the 1919 and 1920 issues of the local paper Mitteilungen desDeutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest”.

28. See Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest”17, no. 8, 1 June 1921.

29. “Aus dem Vereinsleben,” Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins“Berlin-Nordwest” 15, no. 6, June 1919.

30. Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest” 15, no.7, July 1919.

31. “Unsere Helferinnen,” Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins“Berlin-Nordwest” 15, no. 12, December 1919.

32. Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest” 15, no.12, December 1919, and vol. 16, no. 5, April 1920.

33. A good source, besides the already quoted references, is the newsletterDeutschnationaler Volksfreund. (Das amtliche Nachrichtenblatt desLandesverbandes Berlin der DNVP und seiner Kreise), published in1922–23.

34. Deutschnationaler Volksfreund 4, no. 9, 1 May 1922.35. Deutschnationaler Volksfreund 5, no. 28, 2 December 1923, and no. 29, 12

December 1923.36. See Deutschnationaler Volksfreund 5, no. 16, 15/20 August 1923, and no.

25, 11 November 1923.37. See Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest”

16, no. 9, 15 June 1920, and vol. 17, no. 3, 1 February 1921.

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38. Asta Rötger, “Zur Kommunalpolitik,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 40, 3October 1929; “Eine deutsche und evangelische Frau,” Frauen-korrespondenz 14, no. 15, November 1932. See also Nancy Reagin, AGerman Women’s Movement (Chapel Hill and London: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1995), pp. 6–7, on similar feelings expressed by conserva-tive women in Hanover before 1914.

39. Annagrete Lehmann, “Aus der Arbeit unserer Landesfrauenausschüsse,”Die Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 8, 15 July 1931.

40. Jane Voigt, “Frauenarbeit in der Nordmark,” and Margarethe Karding,“Versammlungen der Ortsgruppen,” both in Mitteilungen DeutscheVolkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 1, no. 14, 16 September 1919.

41. See for example the report on the party conference of the province, in Mitteil-ungen Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 2, no. 18, 6 October 1920.

42. “Frauentagung der Deutschen Volkspartei in Neumünster,” MitteilungenDeutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 4, 12 February 1921.

43. Mitteilungen Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 8, 28 April1921.

44. Elisabeth Cimbal, “Frauenausschüsse und ihre Arbeitsgebiete,” Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4, no. 2, 29 January 1922.

45. Lisbeth Haas, “Die Frau in der Kommunalpolitik,” Schleswig-HolsteinischeStimmen 4, no. 13, 12 July 1922.

46. Elisabeth Cimbal, “Warum soll die Frau Politik treiben?” Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4, nos. 17/18, 21 October 1922.

47. Jane Voigt, “Zur Rentnerfürsorge,” Mitteilungen Deutsche VolksparteiSchleswig-Holstein 3, no. 8, 28 April 1921, and Voigt, “Rentnerhilfe,”Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4, no. 19/20, 4 November 1922.

48. “Sitzung des Wahlkreisfrauenausschusses in Itzehoe am 9. Oktober 1921,”Mitteilungen Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 21, 7November 1921.

49. Cimbal, “Frauenausschüsse und ihre Arbeitsgebiete.”50. “Aus dem Geschäftsbericht der Gesamtpartei,” Mitteilungen Deutsche

Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 24, 23 December 1921.51. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußen 2, no. 4, 1 October

1920.52. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußen 2, no. 7, 15 November

1920 (emphasis in the original).53. “Gründung des Wahlkreisfrauenausschusses der Deutschen Volkspartei

Ostpreußens,” Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußen 2, no. 9,15 December 1920.

54. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußen 2, no. 1, 15 August1920.

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55. Olga Herschel, “Eine Aufgabe für Frauenausschüsse,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 47, 25 November 1920.

56. Berliner Stimmen 7, no. 15, 13 April 1930.57. See Chapter 3 in this volume.58. “Aus den Frauenausschüssen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 3, 15 January

1920.59. “Finanzfragen der Frauenausschüsse,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 2, 19

January 1923.60. “Aus den Frauenausschüssen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 8, 19 February

1920.61. Berliner Stimmen 3, no. 9, 1 June 1926.62. “Frauenausschüsse der D.V.P.,” NLC 51, no. 93, 11 June 1924, Berliner

Stimmen 1, no. 4, 27 April 1924, and NLC 58, no. 15, 12 April 1931.63. Berliner Stimmen 2, nos. 21 and 24, 23 May 1925 and 27 June 1925.64. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 13. April

1919, pp. 47 and 66.65. Ilse Szagunn, “Über die Arbeit der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der

Frauenausschüsse Groß-Berlin,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 23, 9November 1923.

66. Berliner Stimmen 2, nos. 27 and 29, 1 October and 10 November 1925, andvol. 5, no. 7, mid-April 1928.

67. Ida Klockow, “An die Frauen,” Berliner Stimmen 6, no. 45, and “Das neueDeutschland und die berufstätige Frau,” Berliner Stimmen 6, no. 44, 10November 1929, with complaints about the poor representation of women.See also Berliner Stimmen 5, no. 12, Early July 1928, with the assertion that52.5 percent of the DVP vote in Berlin came from women.

68. Berliner Stimmen 3, no. 7, 1 July 1926.69. Rundschreiben des RFA, no. 2, 15 February 1932, in NStA Osnabrück,

DNVP, vol. 83.70. Rundschreiben des RFA, no. 13, 24 November 1932, in NStA Osnabrück,

DNVP, vol. 83.71. “Aus dem Landesverband,” Nachrichten aus dem Landesverband Westfalen-

Ost der DNVP 2, no. 3, 1 March 1923.72. Berliner Stimmen 6, no. 39, 28 September 1929. See Reagin, A German

Women’s Movement, p. 42.73. Elisabeth Cimbal, “Vorschläge zu einem ländlichen Organisationsplan,”

DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 46, 18 November 1920.

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–9–

The Nazi Challenge

“… sounds like an old fairy tale.”A DVP woman commenting on the

Nazi image of women (1932)1

Works by Ian Kershaw on public opinion and by Robert Gellately on consent andcoercion in Nazi Germany stress the amazing speed with which the Nazis wonbroad approval after taking power in early 1933. To be sure, the Nazis did unleasha wave of terror directed mostly at the Communists, but the importance of enthu-siastic approval for the new government much beyond the previous constituencyof the NSDAP cannot be denied.2 Only six months after the end of the conflict-ridden and extremely polarized Weimar Republic, the Hitler government haddestroyed all other parties besides the NSDAP and taken control over a vast arrayof non-Nazi organizations – in most cases without encountering any resistance.This rapid success would be hard to explain without considering the profounddisaffection with the Weimar Republic shared by the widest circles of theGerman public. In the context of catastrophic unemployment and growingmisery, the idea and pratice of government based on a democratically electedparliament had been thoroughly discredited by 1930. The subsequent haphazardattempts to form a presidential regime – relying on a field marshal who turnedeighty-five in 1932 and had retired for the first time in 1911! – did not fare muchbetter. How did the women of the DVP and DNVP react to the agonizing crisisof the early 1930s, and how did they relate, and perhaps contribute, to the condi-tions that allowed the Nazis such a smooth success after January 1933?

To answer these questions, it is important to consider that the parameters forwomen’s politics in the DVP and DNVP changed profoundly after 1930. Untilthen, much of the women’s political activity had happened in parliaments andparliamentary committees, where right-wing women cooperated constructivelywith women and men from the middle parties. This work was difficult to carryon after 1930 as parliamentary rule was breaking down and Chancellor HeinrichBrüning increasingly resorted to government by presidential decree. For thewomen involved in the DVP, the very weakness of their party after the Reichstagelections of September 1930 precluded effective parliamentary work. Only Elsa

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Matz remained in the Reichstag, and, prolific as she was, she could not cover thebroad range of issues debated by women from her party in earlier years, partic-ularly after the DVP exchanged participation in government for a powerless andpathetic opposition in the fall of 1931. At the same time, Hugenberg shifted theDNVP’s parliamentary politics from critical cooperation toward fundamentalopposition and propaganda, witnessed most spectacularly when the DNVPtogether with the Nazis walked out of the Reichstag in February 1931.3 Althougha few notable women associated with the DNVP workers’ movement left theparty in response to Hugenberg’s course, the majority of activist DNVP womenfrequently applauded him and his strictly anti-democratic course.4 After the July1932 Reichstag elections, in any case, orderly parliamentary procedures becamenearly impossible because the Nazis and Communists now shared more than halfthe seats and debates easily escalated into fist fights.5 The last pre-Nazi govern-ments tried to convene the Reichstag as rarely as possible because they soughtways to establish a presidential regime independent of parliamentary majorities.None of the DVP and DNVP women elected to the Reichstag from July 1932 onever spoke a single public word in it. The chaos and paralysis typical for theReichstag was duplicated in almost every state diet that held elections in theearly 1930s. The SPD-led Prussian government, which had stayed in officebecause no other government could be formed after the Landtag elections ofApril 1932, was illegally dismissed by Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen in Julyand replaced by an authoritarian caretaker government. Meanwhile, mass unem-ployment and political violence led to a breakdown of the social order limitingthe opportunities for regular campaigning by all parties between the Communistsand Nazis. Meetings were interrupted by armed units of hecklers, violenceagainst political opponents was the rule, and the feverish pace of electioncampaigns particularly in 1932 – with two Reichstag elections, two rounds ofpresidential elections, and the Prussian Landtag election – drained the energiesof the more moderate parties and spread a sense of resignation among manypoliticians from the SPD to the DVP and DNVP.

With unemployment reaching catastrophic proportions, the position of profes-sional women and of leading women in the bourgeois parties came underincreasing threat. Women were pushed to leave the job market and to make roomfor men. The pressure was strongest on married women (the so-called “doubleearners”) because of the widespread but erroneous notion that most marriedwomen neglected their motherly “duties” only to supplement an already suffi-cient income from their husbands. Meanwhile, women from the DVP and DNVPwatched with a mixture of anxiety and fascination the meteoric rise of theNSDAP, which cut deeply into their own voter pool. After some successes inlocal and state elections in 1929 and 1930, the NSDAP gained over 18 percentof the national vote in September 1930 (more than six times as much as 1928),

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and it doubled that share in July 1932, becoming the largest party in theReichstag. Its losses in the Reichstag election of November 1932 were too smallto allow a revival of regular legislative proceedings. The growth of the NaziParty, which continued to exclude women from its parliamentary groups, helpeddiminish the number of women in parliaments, while the militarization of poli-tics by male street fighters did not bode well for women’s voice in politics. Asearly as January 1930, political women thus became increasingly disillusionedwith the promise of equality and with their power in politics, and they reactedwith bitterness or resignation. The discussion of a women’s party was revived,but many politically active women seem to have withdrawn into private life.Women from the DVP and DNVP tried to defend women’s place in politics, butthe limits imposed on their parliamentary activity tended to encourage ideolog-ical stands at the expense of pragmatism in their work. As early as January 1930,Martha Schwarz of the DVP drew a pessimistic picture. In over ten years, shesaid, women had had little impact on political life, and many had become criticalof democracy and the established parties. She stressed that women in parliamentswere measured against unusually hard standards; this was particularly unfairgiven that there were so few of them, and parliamentary women thus had to coverso many fields that it was easy to find them making mistakes. Although Schwarzattested to women’s strong belief in (supposedly male) leadership, of which sheherself approved, she believed that the impact of women was necessary for thesurvival of democracy. Appealing to the cultural mission of the German women’smovement, Schwarz claimed that only women could overcome the corruptaspects of democracy.6 Later in the year, the poor positioning of women on theDVP’s ballots for the Reichstag elections of 14 September provoked bittercritique from the RFA, which claimed that under these circumstances the DVPwould lose the votes of many women. The document attested to male partymembers’ ” complete lack of psychological understanding for the work andmentality of women.” The Central Board (Zentralvorstand) of the DVP acknowl-edged the complaint but decided not to change the ballots.7 In the DNVP, thecontinued poor consideration of female candidates at all levels of political lifealso drew criticism. The Frauenkorrespondenz pointed out, for example, that thebourgeois party groups in the Saxon Landtag included not one woman after theelections of June 1930.8 In 1931 Annagrete Lehmann criticized that manyregional sections of the DNVP seemed to believe that they could dispense withthe work of women. She pointed out that the party was most successful in placeswhere cooperation between women and men worked best.9 The stunning successof the NSDAP in spite of its professed hostility to women’s rights, however,undercut the claims of leading right-wing women for better representation. At aBDF leadership meeting in October 1930, Emma Ender warned: “After a partythat blatantly ignores the existing political rights of female voters [the NSDAP]

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The Nazi Challenge


has nonetheless made such big gains, we have to expect that in all parties thealready weakened position of women will become even weaker as a consequenceof this experience.”10

The defense of women’s rights against the Nazis therefore was a central themeof right-wing women toward the end of the Weimar Republic. In Mein Kampf,Hitler had proposed to limit civil rights to married women. Party ideologueAlfred Rosenberg, in his book Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, had defendedmale polygamy and encouraged Germans to welcome illegitimate children aslong as they were of Aryan stock.11 Although the NSDAP tried to downplay itsown anti-feminism in the final Weimar years, bourgeois women were concernedthat the Nazis would try to consign women to reproduction, mothering, andhousework. The NSDAP’s affinities with neo-paganism and Germanic cults,moreover, made many bourgeois women worry about the integrity of thechurches after a Nazi takeover. Here, too, the NSDAP tried to allay the worstfears at the time of its greatest electoral successes, but Nazi support for theGerman Christian movement (Glaubensgemeinschaft Deutsche Christen), agroup within the Evangelical Church that promoted a “Germanic Christianity”and embraced much of the Nazis’ völkisch ideology, indicated that the NSDAPaimed to win control over Germany’s largest Church.12 Those women in the DVPand DNVP who were affiliated with the Evangelical Church thus were particu-larly apprehensive about the Nazi successes.

In the DVP, party solidarity prevented the leading women from attacking thecautious rapprochement with the NSDAP engineered by chairman EduardDingeldey in response to pressure from the DVP’s right wing.13 The women,however, made no secret of their opposition to the world view and the politicalmethods of the Nazis. They criticized the Nazis in the women’s section(Frauenrundschau) of the Nationalliberale Correspondenz and published apamphlet that attacked the Nazis’ program and politics in a fictional dialoguebetween DVP supporter Frau Wächter (meaning Mrs. Guardian) and Nazisupporter “Frau Hilter [sic].”14 They targeted in particular the Nazi view ofwomen. The “Frauenrundschau” frequently quoted or paraphrased the anti-femi-nist statements of Nazi politicians and scoffed at them. Shortly before theReichstag elections of July 1932, it reported the claim of a Nazi leader that theballot offended the dignity of women because it prevented them from relying onthe chivalry of men. The commentary said: “We can only heartily wish that theNazi women will draw the conclusions from this statement and abstain fromvoting during the next elections. By doing so, they will render a great service tothemselves and to the fatherland.”15 With sharp criticism, DVP women demol-ished the Nazi phrases about the sanctity of motherhood: “What stands behindthese words is nothing but a denigration of the woman and her personality, andamounts to her exclusive subjection under her biological task.”16 Referring to

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Hitler’s claim that women were too good for the crudity and baseness of politics,Elisabeth Lürßen pointed out that the NSDAP itself had done much to pushGerman politics to such low levels.17 As late as spring 1933, DVP womendefended the achievements of the German women’s movement, particularly theright of women to the professions and to political activity. In comparison, theNazi image of women, according to an article in the NationalliberaleCorrespondenz, appeared to come from an “old fairy tale.”18 In the PrussianLandtag, Anny von Kulesza denounced the Nazis’ praise of biological mother-hood by appealing to the idea of spiritual motherhood: “broadened spiritualmotherhood is the source of strong, precious, life-shaping, and socially effectiveforces.” Her statement drew applause even from the DNVP.19

The methods and the character of the Nazi movement were another target ofthe DVP women. Much as they praised authority and powerful leadership, theystressed that subordination under a leader had to happen freely and in full aware-ness of one’s own responsibility. They usually referred to subordination under arespected and proven leader such as Stresemann or Hindenburg. By contrast,they saw the NSDAP as a party that demanded blind submission to Hitler andlured the masses with materialistic promises. The Nazis, according to DVPwomen, thus obliterated individual responsibility, a fundamental value ofGerman culture and the Protestant ethic.20 This critique applied also to the styleof the Nazis, mostly to their violence and cynicism. One event, in particular,provoked the wrath of DVP women: in 1931 a Nazi youth leader advised highschool students to react to unpopular authority figures with a contemptuoussmile that they could then deny when confronted. DVP women attacked thisadvice as a summons to falsehood and cowardice and as an attempt to underminethe authority of teachers.21 Based on their Christian world view, leading DVPwomen juxtaposed the responsibility of the individual toward God with the masshysteria unleashed by the Nazis and criticized Nazi support for the GermanChristian movement.22 In a speech in front of the Prussian Landtag, Anny vonKulesza defined National Socialism as a “Christian form of religious paganism”and pointed out that the Evangelical German Christian movement received itspolitical instructions from the Nazi Gregor Strasser, a Catholic.23

Although the Volksgemeinschaft idea stressed by the Nazis appealed to DVPwomen, they criticized that the Nazis had emptied the concept of its idealisticand conciliatory content by using it as an appeal to primitive mass instincts;instead of promoting peaceful cooperation among the classes, the Nazis wereaccused of awakening spurious hopes in the lower classes and thus exploitingclass differences for their electoral advantage. Articles by DVP women sought todemonstrate, in particular, that the Nazi vision of Volksgemeinschaft discrimi-nated against women by demanding their return to the home – another casewhere Nazi rhetoric masked a materialistic goal with idealistic rhetoric. DVP

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The Nazi Challenge


women also argued that the Nazis’ economic program contained socialistelements. This was tantamount to another charge of materialism because bour-geois politicians saw socialism as a purely materialistic philosophy and thusopposed to the idealistic Volksgemeinschaft. The upshot was that the NSDAPwas a “typical party” regardless of its lofty Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric.24

DVP women, moreover, did not share the racist foundation on which the Naziconcept of Volksgemeinschaft rested. In the DVP, the Volksgemeinschaftcontinued to be defined as a harmonious community of production involving allprofessional groups. DVP women denied that Germany could be saved throughthe solution of an imagined race problem and claimed that the Nazis’ anti-Semitism was motivated by materialistic concerns, too.25 Although DVP womenhad participated in the racist “Black Horror” campaign, only very few of themexpressed a racist definition of the Volksgemeinschaft. This was mostly true forElse Frobenius, the DVP’s leading expert on Germans residing outside of theReich, who often stressed the racial ties between Germans around the world.26

Elsa Matz occasionally used völkisch language and alluded to völkisch themes,but nothing in the context indicates that she meant this in a racist way. If she did,she never bothered to spell it out.27 Yet, whereas the sharpness of DVP women’scritique of Nazi anti-feminism left nothing to be desired, their critique of Nazianti-Semitism was rather muted. To be sure, the Nazis did tone down their anti-Semitism in the early 1930s and focused their propaganda on more immediateconcerns such as the overcoming of the depression, but Nazi anti-Semitism couldnot be ignored given that the terror of the paramilitary Nazi SA was frequentlydirected at Jews even before Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship.28

Occasionally, the DVP women were also implicated in anti-Semitic actspromoted by their party. In October 1932, for example, the DVP organized acampaign rally in Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall featuring speeches by Matz andleading men of the party. Signs were posted at the doors saying that Communists,Nazis, and Jews could not be admitted.29

Whenever their party leadership attempted to pave the way for a rapproche-ment with the Nazis, the leading DVP women reacted with uneasiness. Partyloyalty induced them to justify these moves, but their declarations poorly maskedtheir concerns. When the DVP joined forces with the Nazis by supporting theStahlhelm referendum for an early dissolution of the Prussian Landtag in 1931,Martha Schwarz, the general secretary of the DVP and editor of the“Frauenrundschau” section of the NLC, defended this step by pointing to thealleged corruption of the Prussian government. But Schwarz employed a rhetor-ical device that revealed her disagreement: she framed her defense of theStahlhelm referendum as a series of critical questions each coupled with aresponse defending the referendum. Whereas the questions were piercing andsharp, the responses were weak and artificial. Obviously, no matter how much

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she disliked the left-to-center Prussian government, Schwarz saw little merit inthis referendum, which would have dissolved the Landtag less than a year beforeregular elections were due to take place and brought about a paralyzing Nazivictory in Prussia sooner rather than later.30 The passionate support the“Frauenrundschau” gave to Hindenburg’s reelection campaign a few months laterforms a stark contrast to its muted endorsement of the Stahlhelm referendum.When the DVP leadership began advocating the NSDAP’s entry into the govern-ment in late 1931, the “Frauenrundschau” got into a similar quandary as duringthe Stahlhelm campaign. Else Broekelschen-Kemper defended this decision onthe surface, but her opposition to the Nazis was unmistakable.31 The DVPwomen’s rejection of cooperation with the Nazis had already provoked conflictswith some right-wing women’s organizations and the DNVP women before.During the referendum against the Young Plan, DVP women found themselvesin opposition to the DNVP and some right-wing women’s leagues that hadconnections to both parties. The Bund Königin Luise, a women’s league alignedwith the Stahlhelm, received strong criticism from DVP women for its supportfor the referendum against the Young Plan; this led to an exodus of DVPmembers from the Bund Königin Luise.32 With anger, DVP women alsorecorded that the women in the DNVP declared themselves time and again to bethe only nationally-minded women present in parliaments.33

Yet, behind the defiant anti-Nazi statements of DVP women lurked self-doubtand resignation. They recognized that the rise of the Nazis from a splinter partyto a mass movement had been impossible without the support of women.Initially, DVP women stressed that the NSDAP received the majority of its votefrom men, which was true until July 1932.34 But their claims that woman was the“natural” protector of the political center because she was opposed to violence,civil war, and revolution sounded increasingly hollow. After all, by September1930 the Nazis had likely won more women’s votes than the DVP and DNVPtogether. Gradually, the DVP women admitted that the party system of theWeimar Republic had failed. They quickly attributed this to the materialistic poli-cies of the SPD and the Center Party, but they also criticized themselves forhaving failed to educate the German woman to be a responsible citizen and thusto be more resistent to the Nazis. It appeared as if the suffrage had come as asurprising and hardly earned breakthrough for which German women were notyet ready. This argument, of course, held women to a stricter standard than men,but it was understandable given the hopes of 1918–19 that women’s involvementwould lift politics to a higher moral level. But DVP women also recognized thatthe poor economic situation during much of the Weimar Republic had under-mined the legal gains of women, so that the NSDAP threatened to take awayrights whose benefits women had rarely felt. Sometimes, the critique of DVPwomen was even directed at the hostility toward women in the non-Nazi parties.

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Martha Schwarz argued in 1930: “This restraining of women in all parties maywell have contributed to the fact that many women voting for the Nazis couldhardly have been bothered by the hostility of this party toward them.”35

The mixture of skepticism and resignation was also typical for the attitude ofDVP women after 30 January 1933. The “Frauenrundschau” balked at thesummary condemnation of the Weimar Republic and the achievements ofStresemann by the new Nazi-led government, and DVP women criticized thedecision to schedule new elections because they expected it to produce moreupheaval rather than stabilization. But they did not voice any criticism of themassive wave of terror the Nazis now directed against the political left with thehelp of a purged state and police apparatus. Dingeldey, the party leader, did notwant to alienate the new government because he expected a deadlock betweenthe NSDAP-DNVP coalition and the opposition after the next elections, in whichcase the DVP would be able to tip the scales. Elsa Matz even tried to prepareDVP women for the entry of the DVP into the Nazi-led government. She claimedthat National Socialism (NSDAP) and National Conservatism (DNVP) should becomplemented by the National Liberalism of the DVP.36 At the Reichstag elec-tions of 5 March 1933, however, the NSDAP together with the DNVP won anabsolute majority, and the DVP was reduced to two seats out of 647. There wasnothing left but Dingeldey’s dream that the DVP would one day become therefuge for disgruntled NSDAP and DNVP voters. In this sense, the DVP activistHenny Pleimes appealed to her party to preserve the “courage to be in aminority” and to wait until the DVP would become the rallying point of a “trueVolksgemeinschaft” for people with liberal and national views.37 The last editionof the “Frauenrundschau,” dated 23 March 1933, contained an article by Schwarzthat once again attacked the anti-feminism of the Nazis. Schwarz pointed out thatthe Nazis still refused to let women serve in parliaments and that the number ofwomen in the Reichstag had further declined due to the Nazi gains. But it finallydawned on her that representation in the Reichstag might soon have no impor-tance any more. It is characteristic of the resignation of DVP women in thisperiod that she considered this thought to be a soothing one. Moreover, Schwarzpointed to a Goebbels speech that seemed to her to indicate that the Nazis wouldnot be as restrictive toward the professional and political work of women as DVPwomen had feared.38 At this point, the DVP women’s structure seems to havebroken down already. Whereas Anny von Kulesza supported Dingeldey’s aim tokeep the party alive, Elsa Matz was dismantling the DVP’s Berlin section,encouraging its members to join forces with the “great national movement” ofthe Nazis.39

Like the DVP women, the leading women of the DNVP reacted with ambiva-lence to the rise of the Nazis. But while DVP women were torn between opposi-tion and resignation, DNVP women shifted between critique of some points and

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emphatic approval of others. Whereas the Nazis’ anti-feminism and theirapproach to religion provoked strong resistance from DNVP women, too, theywidely shared the racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis. The irrelevance ofparliamentary politics, the pressure on women’s rights, the radicalization of theDNVP under Hugenberg, and the competition from the Nazis all helped to makethe leading DNVP women after 1930 highly receptive to the ideas of thosewomen who had always combined an engagement for women’s rights with viru-lent racism: the völkisch women’s activists inspired by the late KätheSchirmacher. Before 1930, the ideas of the völkisch activists had been powerfulbut not dominant in the DNVP, but they became the primary agenda of theDNVP women in the last years of the Weimar Republic. That many in theGerman medical community had meanwhile accepted a connection betweenracial hygiene and the notion of Nordic supremacy must have boosted the credi-bility of these ideas among DNVP women.40 The leading DNVP women after1930 therefore affirmed racial and political goals that were very similar to thoseof the Nazis, but they simultaneously staked out a claim for German women toparticipate actively in the buildup of a racial state. This is neatly expressed in thefollowing statement by Ilse Neumann, member of the DNVP group in thePrussian Landtag, from December 1930: “It is impossible for Germanic women’sthinking to leave the fight for the new Germany to men, to let them do all thecleaning up and building up and maybe receive some place in the new Germanylater on.”41

The attacks of DNVP women on the anti-feminism of the NSDAP hardlydiffered from those of the DVP women. Neumann, for example, repeatedlyargued that the Nazi cult of motherhood, though in itself praiseworthy, could notbe limited to the biological meaning of motherhood. In other words, women withtheir maternal sense could be beneficial to society in a variety of social functions– as advocates of spiritual motherhood had claimed decades earlier.42 The toneof the critique was particularly sharp in 1932, when Nazi provocations againstthe DNVP multiplied. DNVP women protested angrily when the Nazis repeat-edly rejected DNVP women as candidates for committees in town parliaments byarguing that women should play no role in politics. In some cases, the Nazis thusmade possible the election of a left-wing man instead of a DNVP woman.43 TheNazis’ refusal to allow women into their parliamentary groups often drew thecriticism of DNVP women, but it also allowed them to point out that the DNVPwas the “only” party sending right-wing women into parliaments – the veryclaim that so angered DVP women.44 Even some of those women who had previ-ously rejected the “Germanic Christianity” cult of the radical right now resortedto the claim that the Germanic tribes had allegedly revered women and accordedthem positions of power. Following on this argument, it was possible to deny thatthe NSDAP was truly völkisch. Here the racist ideas of DNVP women merged

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with their defense of women’s rights. As late as February 1933 Alexa vonPorembsky, a member of the RFA and the Pan-German League, argued that theNSDAP had a völkisch image of men but a “foreign” image of women. Thisconjured up the danger, according to Porembsky, that the Nazi man would shunthe more self-assertive and bold Nordic woman and choose a more submissive,but racially inferior, wife. This would spoil the “racial quality” of the Germanpeople.45 Along the same lines, Porembsky in 1932 had also defended women’sright to work by arguing that the economic system of the Weimar Republic wasdisadvantageous to women because it was not truly “German” but that this wouldchange in the future völkisch state.46

Given that many women in the DNVP were, like their counterparts in the DVP,connected to the Evangelical Church, they also worried about the Nazis’ attitudetoward religion and the Churches. Relentlessly, DNVP women tried to convincethe Nazis that the völkisch state had to be built on a religious foundation and thata nationalist movement without connection to God would become self-absorbedand arbitrary. Else Meyer, a DNVP activist from Hildesheim near Hanover,warned that the Nazis would erect a “cultural dictatorship against conscience”should Christianity cease to be the basis of culture and education in the Nazistate.47 The involvement of the German Christian movement in church electionswas condemned by DNVP women as a politicization of the Evangelical Churchby the Nazis.48 Repeatedly, the DNVP women’s press pointed out that racialthinking and Christianity did not contradict each other and that the former evenreceived “nobility and value” through the latter. This thesis rested on the claimthat God had wanted racial differences between the peoples and that he hadorganized the races in a hierarchy of historical tasks and, implicitly, of values.49

Occasionally the DNVP women’s press condemned acts of violencecommitted by the Nazis. It was not the Nazi terror in the streets, however, thattriggered these condemnations but rather some brawls in the Reichstag involvingNazi deputies. The Deutschnationale Frau used these incidents to drive home itsclaim that the Nazis sorely needed the leadership and discipline of the DNVPunder Hugenberg. Sometimes the confrontation with the NSDAP led DNVPwomen to stress their conservative view of the state. Magdalene von Tiling, inparticular, pointed out that the state rested on divine authority and should not beabused or changed arbitrarily by interest groups and parties. But this approach,probably provoked by the Nazis’ quasi-socialist message, harkened back to thesupposed “legitimacy” of the German Empire before 1918 and had nothing to dowith the defense of the Weimar Republic.50 The mass hysteria triggered by Nazipropaganda as well as the Hitler cult also figured as targets of DNVP women’scritique. Paula Mueller-Otfried was particularly disgusted by the veneration ofHitler by many German women. But Mueller-Otfried and other DNVP womenalways tried to distinguish their own veneration of Hugenberg from the Hitler

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cult, thereby following the same argumentative paths that DVP women usedwhen justifying their adoration of Stresemann and Hindenburg. Ilse Hamel, forexample, argued that submission under the authority of a leader was absolutelyGermanic (“urgermanisch”) but that it had to be directed toward an experiencedand ingenious leader such as Hugenberg.51 She and other DNVP women insinu-ated that submission under Hugenberg happened in freedom and self-respect,whereas Hitler seduced the masses and made them devoid of will. DNVP womenthus attacked the Nazis for their electoral successes, implying that thesesuccesses were unethical because they had been won by the seduction of themasses. Yet, all this confrontation could not erase the feeling of kinship mostDNVP women felt toward the Nazis. DNVP women loved to present their ownparty as the experienced political force and the Nazis as the impatient but well-intended youth at their side. This partnership was symbolized by the mature andportly Hugenberg next to the young and impetuous Hitler. Based on this image,DNVP women claimed that the DNVP deserved a leadership role in the nationalopposition – or at least equal rights – because the DNVP acted on higher ethicalprinciples than the Nazis.52 Yet in the end, DNVP women above all wanted toensure that the racial state to be erected by the Nazis, of which they approved,would welcome German women’s collaboration in public as well as privatevenues.

Despite all their criticisms, the DNVP women in this period never forgot whatunited them with the Nazis, namely their racialized vision of the Volks-gemeinschaft. The racist message of the leading DNVP women permeated theirarticles, speeches, and programmatic writings. Die Deutschnationale Fraupoured out a mass of untranslatable völkisch jargon to encourage women tobecome the breeders and educators of a racially conscious people.53 Elsa vonLindequist, the newsletter’s editor at this time, demanded for example that the“Judaization” of German culture finally be stopped and expressed the hope thatall Germans would one day be proud of having a pure race.54 A school programdrafted by DNVP school experts – including several women – called for thedismissal of Jewish and atheistic teachers and demanded that racial education begiven a central place in the school curriculum.55 Alexa von Porembsky and Dr.Irmgard Wrede, both members of the RFA and the Pan-German League, organ-ized conferences on racial hygiene and presented its concepts in many articles forDie Deutschnationale Frau. The racial hygienicists whose theories were therebypromoted, foremost among them Hans K.F. Günther, divided the German peopleinto a hierarchy of six types, ranging from the most appreciated “Nordic” race tothe members of the “eastern-Baltic race”, who were depicted with contempt. Asnon-Germanic people, the French, the Slavs, and the Jews were considered evenlower in value. The basic axioms of these teachings, which received an eminentplace in the school curriculum of the Third Reich, stated that the mixture of races

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spoiled racial quality and that the higher racial types should be encouraged toprocreate more than the others. DNVP women therefore recommended to theirreaders and listeners that women should “marry up” the quality scale.56 Theyfailed to explain, however, how certain people could “marry up” withoutmembers of the higher racial types “marrying down” and thus spoiling the race.A particularly elaborate proposal came from the pen of the DNVP physician Dr.Annemarie Burgund a few weeks before Hitler became chancellor. Burgunddemanded that “racially inferior” persons be placed in asylums and that two cate-gories of citizenship be introduced: a privileged one for “people’s citizens”(Volksbürger) of pure Aryan stock, and a lower one for “state citizens”(Staatsbürger) of lesser value or of alien racial background. Burgund also tookup the proposal of Pan-German leader General Leopold von Vietinghoff-Scheelto build up a network of so-called “race guardians.” These state-appointed offi-cials would monitor the racial composition of the population and advise theAryan population in their choice of a marriage partner. Burgund obviouslyexpected that the office of the race guardian would open an excellent job oppor-tunity for women squeezed out of jobs during the depression.57 The culminationof the DNVP women’s embrace of racial hygienic thought was a programmaticdocument of February 1933 that defined the German woman above all as theguardian of the race.58

The crescendo of racist statements by DNVP women encountered almost noopposition in the party. Only Else Meyer, a DNVP activist with connections tothe Evangelical Church, voiced critical remarks after reading the NSDAP’scultural program in July 1932: “Such a disputed issue as the race questionrequires the most careful clarification before it is made into an instrument ofmass education. Otherwise, it becomes mere phraseology.”59 It is obvious thatthose women who had the closest ties to the Evangelical Church, such as PaulaMueller-Otfried and Magdalene von Tiling, remained ambivalent about racialhygienic ideas, probably because the women promoting them often referred totheories of “Germanic Christianity”, according to which Jesus was an Aryanwhose ideas had been distorted by Jews and other non-Germanic peoples.60 Theleadership of the Evangelical Church officially rejected these theories in spite ofgrowing sympathy for them within all ranks of the Church.61 Yet the intensifica-tion of the DNVP women’s racism received full support from AnnagreteLehmann, who was chair of the RFA, member of the DNVP’s National VölkischCommittee, and one of the vice-chairs of the party.62

Given its connections to reproduction and education, two agreed-uponwomen’s spheres, the racist campaign was defined by DNVP women as aspecific women’s mission. Although some men in the party, particularly thoseorganized in the National Völkisch Committee, shared in the outpouring of racistideas, it appears that the women stressed this issue more than the men. Whereas

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the Frauenkorrespondenz/Die Deutschnationale Frau was full of racist ideas in1930–33, the general party newsletter Unsere Partei (later: DeutschnationaleFront) contained only a single explicitly racist article in this entire period –written by Alexa von Porembsky!63 But it should also be stressed that theemphasis of the DNVP women’s campaign was on racial hygiene and that theygenerally avoided hateful anti-Semitic statements. It seemed as if they stillfollowed Johanna Richter’s 1922 recommendation that women should fightJewish cultural influence not through violent outbursts but through educationalwork. Yet their approach anticipated the spirit of the discriminatory NürnbergLaws of 1935 and the Nazi sterilization and euthanasia programs.

The DNVP women’s reactions to the appointment of the Hitler cabinet on 30January 1933 confirmed that the common ground between them and the Naziswas stronger than the dividing power of the Nazis’ attitude concerning womenand religion. Die Deutschnationale Frau reacted enthusiastically to the end of thehated Weimar Republic, the repression of the left, and the beginning of a statebuilt on völkisch principles. Even Mueller-Otfried and Tiling, whose Churchconnections might have evoked more caution, were overjoyed that the WeimarRepublic had been destroyed.64 Elisabeth Spohr, the most experienced DNVPrepresentative in the Prussian Landtag, was enthusiastic about what she calledthe “liberation from the icy wind of the Marxist world view that had frozen allnational-völkisch and Christian life with a deadly force.”65 At a time when Nazismurdered and imprisoned their left-wing opponents, Annagrete Lehmannexpressed her satisfaction with Hitler’s “fascinating reckoning with Marxism.”Like other DNVP women, she understood that the Nazi terror operated outsidethe realm of traditional legality but made it clear that she forgave the Nazis their“occasional excesses.”66 At an RFA meeting in the middle of February 1933, IlseNeumann called on the DNVP to stress its völkisch attitude and its anti-Semitismeven more. At this meeting, the RFA presented a short programmatic documentthat combined the racist engagement of the DNVP women with their more tradi-tional conservative, religious, and militaristic spirit. The first task of the Germanwoman was, according to the document, to be the “guardian and caretaker of therace.” But women should play this role not only, as Nazi ideologues had claimed,in their home and family but also in public life.67

Soon after the March 1933 elections, however, the mood of the leading DNVPwomen soured. Whereas Lehmann, who was present at almost all meetings of theparty leadership, hoped that the DNVP and NSDAP would organically mergeand form a synthesis of Hitler’s and Hugenberg’s aims, the reality was that theNazis bullied DNVP members to join the NSDAP. Hugenberg ran into increasingdifficulties with Hitler and the other Nazis in the cabinet. Lehmann was happythat the Nazis either took over or dissolved the traditional women’s organiza-tions, but she could not understand why the DNVP women, having done so much

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to fight the democratic tendencies of the German women’s movement, were notinvited to participate in this process.68 At the end of June 1933, Hugenbergresigned from the Hitler cabinet and the DNVP dissolved itself, not seeing anyremaining avenue for an independent existence.

What did the women who had been active in the DVP and DNVP do in theThird Reich after the dissolution of their parties? Evidence is sparse and scat-tered, but there are examples of prominent women who continued some publicactivity: Else Frobenius, who published an adulatory book on Nazism andwomen in 1933 (Die Frau im Dritten Reich), continued her journalistic careerthroughout the Third Reich.69 She joined the NSDAP on 1 May 1933 and was amember of many specialized Nazi organizations. She published extensively innewspapers and magazines and frequently spoke on the radio. She moved herprevious engagement on behalf of the Germans outside Germany, and herpromotion of German colonies, seamlessly into the agenda of the Third Reich.70

Elsa Matz remained director of her high school in Berlin-Charlottenburgthroughout the Third Reich. She participated in many activities of the NS-Frauenschaft, the Nazi women’s organization, and faithfully supported the localNSDAP section. She applied for NSDAP membership in late April 1933 but wasrejected almost two years later because of an anti-Nazi remark she had utteredduring an election campaign rally in October 1932. Matz then asked Rudolf Hessand the NSDAP Party Court to reconsider her application. She pointed out: “Iendeavor to lead my school … in the National Socialist spirit. Many events provethis. I cooperate closely with the NS-Frauenschaft of my local party section andwith the NS-Volkswohlfahrt. Mine was the first school that organized the dona-tion of baby baskets for the ‘Mother and Child’ action, and we collected signifi-cant sums for the Winter’s Aid program. My work outside my profession, partic-ularly in the Colonial Women’s League and the German Gymnastics League, alsocorresponds to the goals of National Socialism.”71 As proof that she had fought“against the pacifist lie” and for a national education before 1933, Matzsubmitted a 1929 article from the left-leaning magazine Die Weltbühne, whichdepicted her as a tyrannical school director who imposed military discipline onher Berlin school, making her girls walk in goose step and sing nationalistsongs.72 Several SS officers acquainted with Matz submitted letters of supportfor her, but the head of the Party Court, Walter Buch, rejected her plea. As oneof the twelve Nazis elected to the Reichstag in 1928, Buch wrote that he did notremember Matz as “the kind of woman whom we like to welcome in our move-ment.”73 Buch conceded, however, that Matz could be admitted once the restric-tions on the admission of new party members were eased. Matz finally wasadmitted into the party in November 1939, but some party members challengedher membership even then, though apparently without success.74 In late 1941,Matz was asked by the NSDAP to travel to Italy to study the effects of

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Mussolini’s school reform on the physical education of girls, but the evidencedoes not show whether she completed the trip.75 Like Frobenius, Matz easilytransferred her activities into the Third Reich; she probably had to change littlein the direction of her school, and her work for the Nazi program “Mother andChild” recalls the Mütterhilfe Wanderkorb initiated by the Berlin DVP in the1920s. The only inconvenience was that she had been in the Reichstag and hadmade some remarks against the Nazis. Matz remained director of her school until1946. As a retiree, she resettled in Lower Bavaria and helped organize socialservices for German refugees. She died in Munich in 1959, having just receivedthe German National Medal (Bundesverdienstkreuz) for her work in theReichstag and in the development of the German education system for girls.76

Clara Mende, Matz’s predecessor at the head of the RFA, had become disillu-sioned with the DVP as early as 1928, when she failed to secure reelection to theReichstag (which she ascribed to the influence of anti-feminism in her party).She then received an appointment as head of the new section for householdmatters in the Reich Economics Ministry and consequently stepped down fromher seat in the DVP’s Party Board (Parteivorstand). Hopeless about the DVP’sfuture, she joined the DNVP in 1932 but played no role in the leadership of thatparty.77 After the Nazi takeover, she became a member of the Reichs-schrifttumskammer, which allowed her to continue publishing in the Third Reich.Mende also continued working as director of her home-economics school inBerlin-Tempelhof. Her application for NSDAP membership was rejected,however. A report commissioned by the judges of the Party Court found that shehad done nothing against the Nazis after their takeover but had occasionally crit-icized the NSDAP in the Reichstag (the Nazi press used to call her“Lügenklärchen” – Little Lying Clara). That Mende had good contacts to GertrudScholz-Klink, who in 1934 became the leader of the NS-Frauenschaft, helped herto continue her professional activity throughout the Third Reich but was notenough to guarantee her NSDAP membership. Mende died in 1947.78 IlseSzagunn, the physician and energetic organizer of the Greater Berlin women’scommittees of the DVP, stayed on as a member of the Prussian State HealthCouncil (Landesgesundheitsrat) and as executive officer of the League ofGerman Women Physicians (Bund Deutscher Ärztinnen); in 1934, she defendedthe Nazi sterilization laws.79 Unlike Mende and Matz, Anny von Kulesza kepther distance from the NSDAP in the brief period of the Third Reich that shewitnessed before her death in October 1934. At her funeral, former DVPchairman Dingeldey gave a speech that vindicated Stresemann and criticized theThird Reich. Everything indicates that she would have approved.80

Evidence on the DNVP women is less complete. Dr. Irmgard Wrede, a youngRFA member, got herself arrested by the Gestapo in Breslau on 15 June 1933 foranti-Nazi activities. A friend had denounced her to the secret police for remarks

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directed against Hitler. Given her virulent racism, it is likely that she criticizedHitler for his anti-feminism rather than for any abuse of human rights.81 Wrede’sarrest led to a flurry of legal and political initiatives by Hugenberg (then still inHitler’s cabinet), Annagrete Lehmann, and Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven, theparty’s legal expert. In a personal discussion with Hitler six days after the arrest,Hugenberg received the assurance that Wrede would be freed without delay.82

The fact that she could publish a book in Nazi Germany only two years latersuggests that her run-in with the Gestapo did not affect her career in the ThirdReich.83 As for Mueller-Otfried, she had to step down from the leadership of theEvangelical Women’s League, but she was close to retirement anyway. She wasstill working on the board of a league against the international traffic in girls inthe later 1930s. She died in 1946.84 Although Tiling had hoped for cooperationwith the Nazi regime, she lost her position as leader of the Evangelical umbrellaorganization VEFD and had to resume her teaching profession until her retire-ment in 1938. She stayed aloof from the Nazi regime but also did nothing tooppose it.85 Lenore Kühn, who joined the Managing Board of the BDF in theearly 1930s, had already promoted the Nazi cause by encouraging her colleaguesnot to let the Nazis’ anti-feminism estrange the BDF from the NSDAP: “Thewomen’s movement, on the contrary, belongs organically into NationalSocialism.”86 After the Nazi takeover, she worked briefly for the journalDeutsche Kämpferin edited by the völkisch women’s activist Pia Sophie Rogge-Börner.87 She had to supplement the meager income from her publications withoccasional work for publishing houses and by giving piano lessons. She leftBerlin in 1943 after her home had been destroyed in a bombing raid andpondered working in an ammunitions factory to help avoid Germany’s defeat.She died in West Germany in 1955.88 Ilse Hamel, one of the völkisch women’sacitivists who was acquainted with Kühn and Rogge-Börner, received anappointment as an expert for women’s questions in Joseph Goebbels’Reichsschrifttumskammer, the office in charge of monitoring literary productionin the Third Reich.89 Käthe Schirmacher did not live to see the Nazis’ coming topower, but she was revered by the Third Reich for her nationalism and racism.The Nazis conveniently belittled her engagement for women’s rights and ignoredher lesbianism.90 What Annagrete Lehmann did after the dissolution of theDNVP is unclear. Like Hugenberg, she may have spent the rest of the Nazi yearsin retirement. She died in 1954. Most other DNVP women probably concentratedon working in their own leagues, where this was still possible, or withdrew frompublic life.

Altogether, the women’s response to the Nazi challenge is ambiguous. Theharshest criticism launched by the women from both parties was in terms of theirdefense of women’s rights against the Nazis’ anti-feminism and their concernover the Nazis’ control of the Evangelical Church. The first theme was shared by

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most parties; even the SPD used it in its propaganda against the Nazis – with thefamous campaign poster showing an angry SA man with a whip watching awoman tie his boot.91 Yet the defense of women’s rights meant different things towomen from the DVP and to those from the DNVP. Whereas the leading womenof the DVP adhered to ideas that were at least related to the liberal tradition ofindividual rights, it seems to me that the DNVP activists in this period meantsomething rather different. The equality of the sexes stressed in particular by thevölkisch women’s activists in the DNVP never implied that Germanic womenwould actually be free to make their individual choices regarding such issues asreproduction, choice of a mate, or upbringing of the children. Völkisch activistssimply claimed that a pure-blooded Nordic woman, free of all “foreign” influ-ences, would instinctively choose a prescribed path. This would mean that shewould be bold, free, and intensely nationalist, and that she would follow aninstinctive sense for racial hygiene that “foreign” cultural influences hadallegedly disturbed. If a Nordic woman failed to display this kind of behavior, itwould only prove that she was either racially impure or ideologically misled. Thisline of thought showed all the circular reasoning typical for Nazi hermeneutics.92

It did not leave room for individual choice and freedom. By implying a certainbehavior that Nordic women would have to adopt on the basis of their genes, thisapproach was in reality very constraining. The völkisch women’s activists thusshared an idea of emancipation that was far removed from the western and liberalnotion of individual and natural rights. In the worldview of völkisch women,there were rights, but no choices.

Ironically, the Nazis’ bark turned out to be worse than their bite with respectto women’s rights and church issues. After an initial push to get women out ofthe work force, directed mostly against academic women, the Nazi regime feltcompelled to reverse its policies. After 1936, with war preparation creating alabor shortage, and particularly in the later years of the war, the regime beggedwomen to join the labor force in ever greater numbers. Even in the initial years,the reverses women faced with respect to their professional rights were lesssevere than expected. As some of the DNVP women had hoped, moreover, thepopulation policies of the Nazi regime required the work and expertise of manywomen, be it in social work or in the medical apparatus.93 Whereas the restric-tive policies of the Nazis toward women thus did not fully confirm the fears ofthe DVP and DNVP activists before 1933, the Nazi policies that were designedto encourage motherhood and to raise the birthrate would have found theiremphatic approval. Women from both parties had always stressed that actualmotherhood was women’s highest profession, even though it should not be theonly avenue open to them. Nazi marriage stipends and rewards to mothers of fouror more children (secretly called “Karnickelorden” – rabbit medal) breathed thespirit of many DVP and DNVP women’s policies from the Mütterhilfe

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Wanderkorb to their joint involvement in the National League for Large Families.The fears that the Nazis would infiltrate and manipulate the Evangelical Churchappeared justified in the short run, but this threat, too, turned out to be lessserious than predicted. Hitler did appoint members of the German Christianmovement to leading positions in the Church, but Nazi control remained incom-plete, and Hitler pursued no consistent policy – even losing interest in theGerman Christian movement after a few years. With massive support for theregime coming out of all ranks of the Evangelical Church, the issue of Nazicontrol over the Church was a moot point. Although all Churches might havebeen threatened had the Nazi regime won the Second World War, the regimechose not to put too much pressure on them before and during the war.94

While women from both parties launched a weak critique of the Nazis’methods, they drastically underestimated the danger of a full-blown dictatorship.Only very late, if at all, did DVP women comprehend that the fight for women’srepresentation in parliament made little sense in a dictatorship, and DNVPwomen grossly erred in their belief that Hitler would reward their racism andtheir fight against the democratic women’s movement by letting them participatein the buildup of the völkisch state. Even the defense of women’s rights madelittle sense without a defense of the sanctity of law in general.95 This the womenof both parties did not do, and they would have been at a loss if asked to explainwhich state and which law they wanted to uphold. Having thus failed to hold theNazis to the most basic legal standards during their terror against the Left,women from the DVP and – in particular – the DNVP had no ground to stand onwhen the Nazis pressed for the dissolution of their parties and organizations. ForDVP women, resignation and disappointment with the Weimar system was sostrong at this point that they could hardly object to the end of their party activity.DNVP women, in turn, had found so much common ground with the Nazis thatthe continuation of a separate party organization can hardly have appeared aworthy cause to them. Still, it is possible that right-wing women’s resistanceagainst the NSDAP was important for a while in keeping a disproportionatenumber of women voters loyal to the DVP and DNVP. Those districts thatcounted women’s and men’s votes separately for a longer period of time showthat the portion of women’s votes for the DVP and DNVP rose to its highestlevels after 1928 before dropping down to “normal” levels around 1932 – theyear when the NSDAP is assumed to have closed its gender gap.96 At a timewhen male voters rapidly left the DVP and DNVP for the smaller-interest partiesand, ultimately, the NSDAP, there seems to have been a delay in the same move-ment of women. This would indicate that there was a grain of truth in the oftenstated claim of bourgeois women that women tended to be more loyal to theirparties than men.

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Notes

1. “Kann die berufstätige Frau Hitler wählen?” NLC 59, no. 60, 24 March1932.

2. Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich(London: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 53–62, and Robert Gellately,Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford and NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2001). Peter Fritzsche makes the same pointin Germans Into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998),pp. 217–35.

3. Hiller von Gaertringen, “Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei.” In EricMatthias and Rudolf Morsey, eds., Das Ende der Parteien 1933 (Düsseldorf:Droste, 1960), pp. 554 and 618.

4. The two defecting women were Else Ulbrich, member of the PrussianLandtag, and Margarethe Wolff, Behm’s successor at the helm of the Leaguefor Female Home Workers. See Günter Opitz, Der Christlich-sozialeVolksdienst: Versuch einer protestantischen Partei in der Weimarer Republik,Beiträge zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien,37 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1969), pp. 150, 178, and 217. For an early exampleof solidarity with Hugenberg in the DNVP women’s press, see AnnagreteLehmann, “Ernste Entscheidungen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 16, 17April 1930. Numerous articles in Die Deutschnationale Frau from March,April, and October 1932 give testimony to a Hugenberg cult of Lehmannand other leading DNVP women.

5. Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik(Düsseldorf, Droste, 2002), pp. 431–2, 436–8, and 466–9.

6. Martha Schwarz, “Frauen und politischer Zeitgeist,” Berliner Stimmen 7, no.2, 12 January 1930.

7. Kolb and Richter, eds., Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer Republik, p.1111 (meeting of 24 August 1930). See also Elsa Matz’s bitter criticism of theDVP at a BDF meeting later in 1930: Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauen-vereine, p. 269.

8. “Keine bürgerlichen Frauen im sächsischen Landtag,” Frauenkorrespondenz12, no. 28, 10 July 1930. See also Dora Schwaak, “Wie sind die Frauen inden städtischen Körperschaften vertreten?” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no.45, 7 November 1929.

9. Annagrete Lehmann, “Aus der Arbeit unserer Landesfrauenausschüsse,”Frauenkorrespondenz 13, no. 8, 15 July 1931.

10. As quoted in Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, p. 255.11. Arendt, Hering, and Wagner, eds., Nationalsozialistische Frauenpolitik vor

1933, pp. 101 und 148.

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12. Ernst Christian Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler:Background, Struggle, and Epilogue (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,1979), pp. 126–28; Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German ChristianMovement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill and London: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1996); and Kurt Nowak, Evangelische Kirche und WeimarerRepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1981), chapter 4.

13. For a detailed account of DVP politics in this period, see Larry E. Jones,German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System,1918–1933 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,1985), chapters 29 and 31. Hans Booms offers a summary, “Die DeutscheVolkspartei.” In Erich Mathias and Rudolf Morsey, eds., Das Ende derParteien 1933: Darstellungen und Dokumente (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1960).

14. RFA der DVP, ed., “Wissen Sie schon —, Frau Hilter?” Flugschriften derDVP 78, Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1931.

15. “Nationalsozialisten und Frauen,” NLC 59, no. 46, 4 March 1932 (Frauen-rundschau 8).

16. Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt, “Die Stellung des Nationalsozialismus zur Frau,”NLC 59, no. 67, 6 April 1932 (Frauenrundschau 13).

17. Elizabeth Lürßen, “Warum sind wir Frauen in der Politik?” NLC 59, no.136, 21 July 1932 (Frauenrundschau 24).

18. “Kann die berufstätige Frau Hitler wählen?” NLC 59, no. 60, 24 March1932 (Frauenrundschau 11). The Evangelical women’s movement sharedthis rejection of Nazism’s attitude toward women. See Lange, Protestan-tische Frauen auf dem Weg in den Nationalsozialismus, p. 103.

19. VdL, 1932–33, vol. I, p. 891.20. Else Broekelschen-Kemper, “Der Nationalsozialismus als Kulturfrage,”

NLC 58, no. 3, 6 January 1931 (Frauenrundschau 1).21. “Frauen und Nationalsozialismus,” NLC 58, no. 42, 25 February 1931

(Frauenrundschau 8); RFA der DVP, ed., “Wissen Sie schon —, FrauHilter?” pp. 9–10; Anny von Kulesza, Frauenfragen der Gegenwart,Flugschriften der DVP 79 (Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1931), pp.18–19.

22. Elsa Matz, “Kulturpolitische Motive im Wahlkampf,” NLC 57, no. 171, 3September 1930; “Ist das christlich?” NLC 59, no. 136, 21 July 1932(Frauenrundschau 24). See also RFA der DVP, ed., “Wissen Sie schon —,Frau Hilter?” and von Kulesza, Frauenfragen der Gegenwart, as well asNowak, Evangelische Kirche und Weimarer Republik.

23. “Frauengedanken über den Nationalsozialismus,” NLC 59, no. 199, 2November 1932 (Frauenrundschau 35).

24. “Volksparteiliche Frauenkundgebung in Berlin,” NLC 57, no. 176, 10September 1930 (Frauenrundschau 29); Johanna Lange, “An der Schwelle

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des neuen Jahres,” NLC 57, no. 251, 30 December 1930 (Frauenrundschau42); “Frauen und Nationalsozialismus,” NLC 58, no. 42, 25 February 1931(Frauenrundschau 8); “Ist Politik unweiblich?” NLC 59, no. 140, 27 July1932 (Frauenrundschau 25).

25. See RFA der DVP, ed., “Wissen Sie schon —, Frau Hilter?”; von Kulesza,Frauenfragen der Gegenwart; and “Frauen und Nationalsozialismus,” NLC58, no. 42, 25 February 1931 (Frauenrundschau 8).

26. See for example Else Frobenius, “Frauenarbeit für deutsches Volkstum,”NLC 53, no. 98, 8 June 1926. See also Helene Fock, “Das bevölkerungspoli-tische Problem in den Grenzlanden,” NLC 53, no. 179, 3 November 1926.

27. See for example Matz’s comments in the Reichstag in June 1925, VdR,1924–1928, vol. 386, pp. 2344–6 (particularly pp. 2345D-2346A), whichemploy völkisch language. See also “Kulturaufgaben des Reiches,” NLC 52,no. 115, 24 June 1925.

28. See Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaftin der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 1999).

29. Geheime Staatspolizei to Präsidenten der RSK, 26 April 1938, in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin Document Center, Reichsschriftumskammer 2100,Clara Mende.

30. MS [=Martha Schwarz], “Volksentscheid in Preußen,” NLC 58, no. 152, 6August 1931 (Frauenrundschau 22).

31. Else Broekelschen-Kemper, “Die Frauen und der Weg der DeutschenVolkspartei,” NLC 58, no. 243, 16 December 1931 (Frauenrundschau 34).

32. “Frauen und Volksbegehren,” NLC 56, no. 198, 3 October 1929; “Königin-Luise-Bund und Deutsche Volkspartei,” NLC 56, no. 210, 18 October 1929.

33. “Druckfehler-Berichtigung,” NLC 56, no. 148, 16 July 1929.34. Martha Schwarz, “Der neue Reichstag und die Frauen,” NLC 57, no. 185, 24

September 1930 (Frauenrundschau 30), and Schwarz, “Reichsfrauen-ausschuß der Deutschen Volkspartei,” NLC 57, no. 236, 4 December 1930(Frauenrundschau 39). See also Helen Boak, “‘Our Last Hope:’ Women’sVotes for Hitler: A Reappraisal.” German Studies Review 12, no. 2 (1989):289–310.

35. Schwarz, “Der neue Reichstag und die Frauen.” See also Else Broekelschen-Kemper, “Reaktion?” NLC 59, no. 221, 8 December 1932, and MarthaSchwarz, “Die Frau im öffentlichen Leben der Gegenwart,” NLC 60, no. 53,23 March 1933 (Frauenrundschau 8).

36. Elsa Matz, “Entschiedenheit und Klarheit bei den Wahlen: Ein Wort an dieFrauen,” NLC 60, no. 39. 1 March 1933 (Frauenrundschau 6).

37. Henny Pleimes, “Der Mut zur Minderheit,” NLC 60, no. 44, 8 March 1933(Frauenrundschau 7).

38. Schwarz, “Die Frau im öffentlichen Leben der Gegenwart.”

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The Nazi Challenge


39. Kulesza to Dingeldey, 28 April 1933; Matz to Dingeldey, 29 April 1933,both in Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Nachlass Eduard Dingeldey (N 1002), vol97. See also Kolonialpolitisches Amt an SS-Sturmführer Grimm, 17February 1936, in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin Document Center, Aktendes Obersten Parteigerichts Z Kammer.

40. Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 20–30.

41. Ilse Neumann, “Die Verantwortlichkeit der Frau gegenüber Volk und Staat,”Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 51, 18 December 1930.

42. Ibid.43. See for example “Warum sind wir Frauen deutschnational?” Unsere Partei

10, no. 7, 5 April 1932.44. Annagrete Lehmann, “Entscheidungswahlen,” Die Deutschnationale Frau

14, no. 7, 1 April 1932; Paula Reincke, “Hamburg muss sich entscheiden!”Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, [no number] 10 April 1932.

45. “Die völkische Tagung am 4. und 5. Februar in Berlin,” Die Deutsch-nationale Frau 15, no. 4, 15 February 1933. Porembsky believed that theDNVP shared the Nazi image of women – though to a lesser degree becausethe DNVP, unlike the Nazis, admitted women to parliaments and supportedwomen’s committees.

46. Alexa von Porembsky, “Vom Berufensein,” Deutschnationale Frau 14, no.5, 1 March 1932.

47. Else Meyer, “Nationalsozialismus und Bildungswesen,” Die Deutsch-nationale Frau 14, no. 13, 1 July 1932.

48. See Magdalene von Tiling, “Der alte and der neue Staat,” DieDeutschnationale Frau 14, election issue, 23 October 1932, und no. 21, 30October 1932; Elisabeth Spohr, “Nationale Frauen und Staatsautorität,” DieDeutschnationale Frau 14, no. 21, 30 October 1932; and many other articlesin Die Deutschnationale Frau during 1932.

49. Pfarrer Steiner, “Der Nationalsozialismus in seiner Stellung zu Christentumund Kirche,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 12, 15 June 1932; see alsoNeumann, “Die Verantwortlichkeit der Frau gegenüber Volk und Staat.”

50. Tiling, “Der alte und der neue Staat.” See also Schneider-Ludorff,Magdalene von Tiling, p. 42.

51. Ilse Hamel, “Hugenberg – Deutschlands Führer zur Freiheit,” Die Deutsch-nationale Frau 14, no. 13, 1 July 1932, und Mueller-Otfried, “Waffen fürden Wahlkampf,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 14, 10 July 1932.

52. Elisabeth Spohr, “Kraftvolle Grenzmarkpolitik ist Preußens Pflicht,” DieDeutschnationale Frau 14, no. 8, 20 April 1932; Elisabeth Spohr, “DasGesetz unseres Handelns,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 19, 1 October1932, and the articles in Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, election issue, 23

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October 1932. See also C. Weitzenmüller, “Schulungstagung in Rudolstadt,”Die Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 10, 15 May 1933.

53. Ria Jansen, “Wir katholischen deutschnationalen Frauen,” Die Deutsch-nationale Frau 14, no. 8, 20 April 1932; Alexa von Porembsky, “Zur Frageder Vererbungsgesetze,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 22, 15November 1932; “Völkische Tagung in Breslau,” Die DeutschnationaleFrau 14, no. 20, 14 October 1932; Freda Freifrau von Rechenberg, “Von derRassenkunde zum völkischen Staat,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 22,15 November 1932.

54. Elsa von Lindequist, “Warum sind wir deutschnational? (Fortsetzung),” DieDeutschnationale Frau 14, no. 5, 1 March 1932.

55. “Unsere Schulforderungen an den Preußischen Landtag,” Die Deutsch-nationale Frau 14, no. 9, 1 May 1932.

56. Alexa von Porembsky, “Zur Rassenfrage,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14,no. 19, 1 October 1932.

57. Annemarie Burgund, “Deutschlands Zukunft im Lichte der Bevölkerungs-frage,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 24, 15 December 1932, and DieDeutschnationale Frau 15, no. 2, 15 January 1933.

58. Rundschreiben Nr. 3, 17 February 1933, in Niedersächsisches StaatsarchivOsnabrück, Erw. C 1, Band 83, Bl. 9–11; the programmatical document isquoted in “Was hat das bisherige System an moralischen Wertenverwirtschaftet?” Die Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 4, 15 February 1933.

59. Meyer, “Nationalsozialismus und Bildungswesen.”60. See for example Magdalene von Tiling, “Das Problem einer deutschen

Religion,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 28, 16 July 1924. See also Lange,Protestantische Frauen, p. 228.

61. See Kurt Meier, “Der ‘Bund für deutsche Kirche’ und seine völkisch-antiju-daistische Theologie.” In Kurt Nowak and Gérard Raulet, eds., Protestant-ismus und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt (M), NewYork, Paris: Campus, 1994, pp. 177–98), and Nowak, Evangelische Kirche,pp. 244–61.

62. Scheck, “Women in the Non-Nazi Right,” pp. 149–50. Lehmann had closecontacts to Hugenberg and access to all party leadership meetings in thisperiod, but she apparently did not promote racial hygienic ideas among themale party leaders. She rarely spoke at the party leadership meetings. For adiary summarizing these meetings, see Hermann Weiß and Paul Hoser, eds.Die Deutschnationalen und die Zerstörung der Weimarer Republik. Aus demTagebuch von Reinhold Quaatz 1928–1933, Schriftenreihe der Viertel-jahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 59 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989).

63. Alexa von Porembsky, “Der völkische Gedanke in der DNVP,” UnserePartei 10, no. 17, 1 September 1932.

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64. Kaiser, Frauen in der Kirche, pp. 163–5; Lange, Protestantische Frauen aufdem Weg in den Nationalsozialismus, pp. 103–4.

65. Elisabeth Spohr, “Vom Eise befreit …,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 15, no.8, 15 April 1933.

66. Annagrete Lehmann, “Furchtlos und treu,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 15,no. 9, 1 May 1933; Annagrete Lehmann, “Nationale Gegenrevolution,” DieDeutschnationale Frau 15, no. 6, 15 March 1933.

67. Rundschreiben Nr. 3, 17 February 1933, in Niedersächsisches Staats-archiv Osnabrück, Erw. C 1, Band 83, Bl. 9–11; the programmatical document is quoted in “Was hat das bisherige System an moralischenWerten verwirtschaftet?” Die Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 4, 15 February1933.

68. Lehmann, “Furchtlos und treu” and Lehmann, “Volkwerdung,” Die Deutsch-nationale Frau 15, no. 11, 1 June 1933.

69. Referring to information in Frobenius’ unpublished memoirs, LoraWildenthal states that Frobenius left the DVP in 1925: see Wildenthal,“Mass-Marketing Colonialism and Nationalism: The Career of ElseFrobenius in the ‘Weimarer Republik’ and Nazi Germany.” In Ute Planert,ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismusin der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2000), p. 337.Frobenius must have erred here. She was reelected to the RFA in November1928, and she continued to contribute to the “Frauenrundschau” of theNationalliberale Correspondenz until early 1933; in some of her articles shewrote as a representative of the RFA. For her reelection in 1928, see“Tagung des Reichsfrauenausschusses der Deutschen Volkspartei,” NLC 55,special edition, 27 November 1928.

70. See documents in the folder Reichskulturkammer 2101, Else Frobenius, atthe BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin Document Center.

71. Matz to Hess, 2 May 1935, in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin DocumentCenter, Akten des Obersten Parteigerichts Z Kammer.

72. “Antworten,” Die Weltbühne, 2 July 1929, pp. 37–8. See also BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin Document Center, Akten des Obersten Parteigerichts ZKammer.

73. Buch to Breithaupt, 8 August 1935, in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, BerlinDocument Center, Akten des Obersten Parteigerichts Z Kammer.

74. NSDAP Parteikanzlei Korrespondenz Elsa Matz, BA Berlin-Lichterfelde,Berlin Document Center.

75. “Allgemeine Bermerkungen,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin DocumentCenter, NSLB Listen.

76. Ilse Brehmer and Karin Erlich (coeditor of vol. 2 only), Mütterlichkeit alsProfession? Lebensläufe deutscher Pädagoginnen in der ersten Hälfte

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dieses Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Band 2: Kurzbiographien (Pfaffenweiler:Centaurus, 1990 (vol. 1) and 1993 (vol. 2)), pp. 175–6.

77. “Notiz,” NLC 55, no. 224, 12 December 1928, and Clara Mende, “Die Fraubei den englischen Wahlen,” NLC 56, no. 122, 13 June 1929. For Mende’sentry into the DNVP, see the note in Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 5, 1March 1933.

78. See documents in the folder Reichskulturkammer 2100, Clara Mende, BABerlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin Document Center.

79. Atina Grossman, Reforming Sex (New York: Oxford University Press,1995), p. 155.

80. BA Koblenz, Kleine Erwerbung 860 (Anny von Kulesza), with Dingeldey’sspeech and biographical materials.

81. Die Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 12, 15 June 1933. See also BundesarchivBerlin-Lichterfelde, Alldeutscher Verband R 8048, Band 489, and“Völkische Tagung in Breslau,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 20, 14October 1932.

82. See the correspondence on Wrede in BA Koblenz, Nachlass Hugenberg (N1231), vol. 39, particularly Hugenberg to Hitler, 22 June 1933, and enclosedmaterials.

83. Irmgard Wrede, Gedanken zum Geldproblem (Bückeburg: GrimmescheHofdruckerei, 1935). The book occasionally mirrors Wrede’s adherence toracial-hygiene theories, as when she rejects the idea of a world currency byarguing that genetics teaches that the universe prefers differentiation (p.167).

84. “Deutsches Nationalkomitee zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels,” in BAKoblenz, Restnachlass Lang-Brumann (Kl. Erw. 65), vol. 1. See also Kaiser,Frauen in der Kirche, pp. 165 and 168–9.

85. Schneider-Ludorff, Magdalene von Tiling, pp. 43–4.86. As quoted in Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine in der Weimarer

Republik, p. 147. See also ibid., pp. 160 and 284.87. BA Koblenz, NL Kühn, vol. 72 (Autobiographische Lebensläufe und Werke).88. BA Koblenz, NL Kühn, vols. 1 and 284. See also Detlef Kühn, “Lenore

Kühn – eine nationale Mitstreiterin der Frauenbewegung.” Nordost-Archiv,nrs. 61–62/63–64 (1981): 39–56/31–54.

89. BA Koblenz, NL Kühn, vol. 284 (letter of 25 November 1936).90. Scheck, “Women in the Non-Nazi Right,” pp. 146–8.91. Gerhard, Unerhört, p. 376; Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes, chapter 5.92. Compare, for example, Carl Schmitt’s claims that Germany should adopt a

democracy without parliamentarism and that it should restrict politicalparticipation by excluding certain “undesirables” from political rights. Theimplication is that the “desirable” Germans would conform to a certain

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imagined range of behavior. If they did not, they may likely be “undesir-ables.” Schmitt thus advocates a democracy with a very restricted latitudefor individual choice and freedom. See Carl Schmitt, Die geistes-geschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (Berlin: Duncker undHumblot, 1926).

93. See Angelika Ebbinghaus, ed., Opfer und Täterinnen: Frauenbiographiendes Nationalsozialismus, Die Frau in der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt (M):Fischer, 1996); Ute Frevert, “Frauen,” in Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml,and Hermann Weiß, eds., Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, 3rd edn.Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1998; Jill Stephenson, “Women,Motherhood and the Family in the Third Reich.” In Michael Burleigh, ed.,Confronting the Nazi Past: New Debates on Modern German History (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); and Leonie Wagner, NationalsozialistischeFrauenansichten: Vorstellungen von Weiblichkeit und Politik führenderFrauen im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt (M): dipa-Verlag, 1996), pp.102–13.

94. Bergen, Twisted Cross, pp. 192–205; Helmreich, German Churches UnderHitler, pp. 338–43.

95. See the similar argument for the BDF in Hönig, Der Bund DeutscherFrauenvereine in der Weimarer Republik, p. 149.

96. Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 84–5;Falter, Hitlers Wähler, pp, 140–1; Boak, “‘Our Last Hope:’ Women’s Votesfor Hitler: A Reappraisal.”

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Conclusion

What did DVP and DNVP women consider most important about their politicalactivity during the Weimar Republic? Most of them would likely give answerscentered on their nationalism. They would stress that they hoped to integrateconservative and not yet politicized women into the German nation and to ensurethat the state would stop impeding women’s ability to be useful in places wherethey could strengthen the nation. Building a strong German nation structuredaccording to a harmonious Volksgemeinschaft was their highest priority. Thisruns like a red thread through all of their activities, from the buildup of awomen’s structure in the hectic early years to the protests against Versailles, thestruggle against “trash and dirt,” the protection of small rentiers, and to thedefense of women’s rights against the Nazis. How successful were they inreaching their aims? The answer here has to be more hesitant and ambiguous.The women from both parties did make great strides in mobilizing women insome areas – the DVP in Schleswig-Holstein and Berlin, the DNVP in EastPrussia, Pomerania, and Berlin – but it appears that most of the mobilizationsuccesses occurred in the early years of the Weimar Republic (until 1923), whenthe threat of communist insurrection and foreign aggression loomed large. In1924, stagnation seems to have set in, and the decline of both parties preventeda revival of women’s activities in the disastrous last years of the WeimarRepublic.

The claim for women’s rights was always secondary to the DVP and DNVPwomen’s interest in a strong nation. The guiding principle for the safeguarding orexpansion of women’s rights was the well-being of the nation, more than some“natural” right that had to be granted for reasons of justice. The DVP and DNVPwomen thus did little to promote an expansion of women’s rights and even backedsome measures hostile to women’s rights (such as the DNVP’s support for thedismissal of married women from the civil service after 1931). The conservatismof the women in many local party branches and the influence of the housewives’organizations in both parties meant that a more determined struggle for women’srights would have alienated much of the rank and file. Still, the leading women ofthe DVP considered the women’s rights enshrined in the Weimar Constitutionimportant enough to make the rejection of Nazi anti-feminism their strongest line

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of defense against the Nazis. For the DNVP women, the defense of women’srights after 1930 meant above all a claim to help shape a future racial statetogether with the Nazis. Even the völkisch women’s activists of the DNVP hardlysaw their stress on women’s rights as resistance to the Nazis: if it was the natureof Germanic culture, as they believed, to grant equal status to men and women,then a truly völkisch state would automatically grant women equality. All one hadto do was to remind the men on the radical right of this.

The focus on Volksgemeinschaft instead of interest politics, besides reflectingthe idealistic roots of the German bourgeois women’s movement, allowed polit-ical women to gloss over the serious rifts between the interests of the variousprofessional groups they represented. This helped the women politicians of bothparties to preserve a large degree of coherence among themselves. There were afew notable defections in reaction to policies of the male party leadership, butthese were not a result of controversies within the women’s structure of theparties. It is possible that the women’s Volksgemeinschaft vision, had it beenhonored and pursued more broadly by their male colleagues, could have becomea force for stability in their parties before the conflicts of special interestscompromised the parties’ credibility and tore them apart. By the same token, theVolksgemeinschaft vision of right-wing women was not above suspicion. At itsbest, it was a nostalgic longing for a national unity that many Germans believedhad existed in August 1914; at its worst it was a partisan, even racist, ploy tojustify middle-class interest politics and to denounce the left-wing parties.

Did the women of the DVP and the DNVP help prepare German women forNazism? The lines of continuity from the mainstream German women’s move-ment, whose ideological parameters the DVP and DNVP women shared, toNazism have attracted much discussion. It is easy to highlight continuities fromthe thinking of Germany’s mainstream bourgeois women’s movement to theNazis, particularly with respect to allegedly inborn differences between thesexes, but the argument becomes pointless considering that these same mentali-ties defied conventional categories of left and right and persisted even after1945.1 As in so many other cases, the connections between the Weimar Republicand the Third Reich are complex and sometimes surprising – attesting to theunusually broad appeal of the Nazis. Who would have thought in the 1920s thatthe DVP’s Ilse Szagunn, an enlightened and independently minded physicianwho cooperated with Adele Schreiber, a member of the SPD from a convertedJewish family, would in 1934 defend the eugenic legislation of the Third Reich?Consider also that Käthe Schirmacher and some young DNVP women inspiredby her, such as Porembsky and Wrede, combined an outspoken claim forwomen’s rights with Nazi-style racism. Still, the efforts of DVP and DNVPwomen to mobilize conservative women for the nation and, in particular, theDNVP women’s demonstrations that racial hygienic thought and Christianity

– 184 –



were compatible may well have eased many women’s decision to vote for theNazis and to support the Nazi regime. Politically passive women from the middleand upper classes did learn from the First World War that their realm was no safehaven protected from the storms of national and international politics. After1918, the women politicians from the DVP and DNVP made sure that thismessage was kept alive and led a large number of these women into party polit-ical activity. That right-wing women were to some extent mobilized before 1930cannot have hurt the Nazis during their rapid rise to power in the early 1930s –it might even have helped to accelerate this process. There is no doubt that thebulk of former DVP and DNVP voters sooner or later supported the Nazis.

By the early 1930s, the women from the DVP and DNVP had lost their abilityto offer a constructive alternative to Nazism. This was typical for the entire polit-ical spectrum between the Communists and Nazis, but it was sobering given theambitious aim with which bourgeois women had entered Weimar politics: tocreate a Volksgemeinschaft held together by women’s maternal mission for thenation. This mission had misfired both in the parties and in the nation at large.Not through their fault alone, women had failed to acquire a strong enough posi-tion in the parties to prevent the parties’ disintegration along the lines of narrow-interest politics, and women’s inter-party connections were never strong enoughto reverse this process on a nationwide level. It therefore appears that the Nazithreat turned the women politicians in the DVP and DNVP into what they hadstruggled for so long not to become: representatives of specific women’s inter-ests. Yet even this is not strictly true. The fixation of right-wing women ondefending women’s rights was in a sense an admission that their own mission fora Volksgemeinschaft had failed and that the Nazis offered a more feasible way ofbuilding it up – even if most DVP and some DNVP women did not adopt themassive racism implicit in the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft. Devoid oftheir own political vision, right-wing women essentially wanted to make sure thattheir maternalist idea would carry over into the new Volksgemeinschaft and thatthey could participate in its construction. The complaints of the leading right-wing women about the Nazis’ closet socialism, threat to religion, and views onwomen seemed relatively minor in comparison to what united them with theNazis. The haste shown by some leading DVP women to join the NSDAP was alogical consequence of the failure of their own mission, and the joy, even ecstasy,with which DNVP women greeted the destruction of the Weimar Republic andthe bloody repression of the Left confirms that the bonds uniting them with theNazis had become more powerful than what separated them.

– 185 –

Conclusion


Note

1. See Christine Wittrock, Weiblichkeitsmythen: Das Frauenbild im Faschismusund seine Vorläufer in der Frauenbewegung der 20er Jahre (Frankfurt:Sendler Verlag, 1983), p. 1; Wagner, Nationalsozialistische Frauenansichten.

– 186 –



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Bibliography


abortion, 87, 88, 89, 99, 141alcohol abuse, xii, 95–6, 98–9Altgelt, Erika, 59, 124anti-Semitism, 6, 25

DNVP and, 6, 9, 10, 25, 27, 34–5, 58, 90, 94, 124, 165, 167, 169

DVP and, 7, 162of NSDAP, 8, 162, 165

apartments, see housingAuguste Viktoria, empress of

Germany and queen of Prussia, 11, 13, 25, 140, 149

Austria, ix, 121

Baden, 7, 86, 124Bach, Johann Sebastian, 127Bartels, Beate, 67, 97Bassermann, Ernst, 52Bassermann, Julie, 52Bavaria, 19, 32, 39, 171

see also BVP and Wolf, GertraudBäumer, Gertrud, 3, 7–8, 24, 17,

151controversy over Verdun article,

126flag dispute, 129

BDF, 10, 36, 37, 38, 77, 129, 159and DDP, 24, 27, 38and Nazism, 7–8, 172, 184ties to DVP and DNVP, 37–8, 54

Becker, Gertrud, 93, 94, 145Beethoven, Ludwig van, 127

Behm, Margarethe, 7, 33, 36, 54, 59, 139, 150

biographical background, 25building up women’s committees,

24–6, 31defending women’s suffrage, 54in parliament, 27legislation for home workers, 73speech on voting age, 92voting for women’s access to juries,

70see also home workers

Berlinlocal elections, 58, 144–5, 149–50school scandal, 93–4site of IAW conference, 127, 129women’s local activism in, 59, 142–

5, 147, 148–50, 164, 171, 183Bernays, Marie, 85, 86, 87–8, 91, 94,

118Birkhahn, Erna von, 66, 90, 128Bismarck, Otto von, 12, 149Bismarckbund, 140birthrate, 76, 86–91, 99, 173

relevance for foreign policy, 1–2, 117, 130

Black Horror on the Rhine, 59, 117, 121–4, 130, 162

see also racismBoak, Helen, 85, 137Boehm, Elizabet, 75Bonin, Margot von, 25, 31

– 225 –

Index


Brahms, Johannes, 148Brandt, Hannah, 31–2, 89, 93, 126Braunert, Margarethe, 145Brickenstein, Cecilie, 36Broekelschen-Kemper, Else, 86–7, 88,

163Brüning, Heinrich, 111, 157Buch, Walter, 170Bund deutscher Ärztinnen, see

League of German Women Physicians

Bund Königin Luise, 12, 20n57, 163Burgund, Annemarie, 168BVP, 5, 27, 92, 99

Catherine the Great, 12Center Party, 37, 60, 73, 87, 89, 97,

99, 163background of women in, 10in Prussian government, 8mobilization of women, 24, 27, 39National School Bill and, 92–3on foreign policy, 120on married women in the civil

service, 69–70on small rentiers, 110–11, 112women’s votes and, 5

children-rich families, 86, 87, 88, 173–4

see also abortion and birthrateChopin, Frédéric, 148Christian Social Party, 25churches, 11, 24, 26, 37, 72, 90, 142

Evangelical, 8, 9, 18n34, 23, 36, 37, 54, 93, 99, 160, 166, 168, 169, 174

threatened by Nazis, 160, 166, 172–3, 173–4

see also DEF, EvangelischeFrauenhilfe, Katholischer deutscher Frauenbund, and VEFD

Cimbal, Elisabeth, 146–7citizenship of women, 66–7civil law, 66, 77, 87civil servants, female, 65, 68–70, 77,

183Communists, 24, 70, 87, 88, 89, 90,

93, 110, 157, 158, 162, 183, 185and female vote, 27on domestic employees, 72

Conservative Party, 25, 36, 54constitution, see Weimar Constitutioncottage industry, see home workersCurtius, Julius, 129Czechoslovakia, 121, 126

Danzig, 27–8, 49–50, 111, 140local women’s activism, 141, 142,

144, 145Dawes Plan, 125, 127, 139DDP, 3, 8, 27, 37, 38, 49, 50, 55, 65,

120, 129and alcohol abuse, 96background of women in, 10failed merger with DVP, 24in Prussian government, 8National School Bill and, 92–3on abortion, 87small rentiers and, 108, 110, 112target of anti-Semitic propaganda, 7women’s committees in, 39, 54women’s movement and, 24

DEF, xi, 23, 25, 36, 172demobilization, 50, 67Depression, Great, 67, 90, 110–11,

112–13, 162, 168Detmering, Margarethe, 93Deutsch, Regine, 39Deutsch, Therese, 75, 88, 95, 96–7,

109building up women’s organization

in East Prussia, 141–2, 147

– 226 –

Index


Deutsche Nationalpartei, 121Deutsche Kämpferin, 172Deutsche Tageszeitung, 27, 55Deutsche Zeitung, 54Deutscher Frauenbund, 37Deutscher Jungmädchendienst, see

German Young Women’s ServiceDeutscher Rentnerbund, see German

Rentiers’ LeagueDeutscher Schutzbund für die Grenz-

und Auslandsdeutschen, seeGerman Protective League for the

Germans on the Borders andAbroad

Deutschnationaler Arbeiterbund, 139Die Deutschnationale Frau, 29, 145,

166, 167, 169Diehl, Guida, xDingeldey, Eduard, x, 34, 160, 164,

171disarmament, see Versailles, Treaty ofdivorce legislation, 87, 89, 99, 138, 140domestic employees (servants), 5,

71–2, 77, 143, 145domestic industry, see home workersDransfeld, Hedwig, 39Düringer, Adelbert, 71DVP-Nachrichtenblatt, 34, 51, 97,

118, 119, 121, 147

East Prussia, 9, 11, 31, 54, 75, 89DNVP women’s structure in,

140–2, 146, 148, 150, 151, 183DVP women’s structure in, 35,

147–8education, see schoolsElizabeth I, 12Ender, Emma, 7, 38, 129, 159–60Esser, Hermann, 112eugenics, 87–8, 102n36, 184

see also racial hygiene

Evangelical Church, see churches,Evangelical

Evangelische Frauenhilfe, 23Evans, Richard, 7–8

film, 97, 98, 122First World War, see World War IFrance, 86–7, 88, 117–26, 129, 130Frauenkorrespondenz, 29, 32–3, 55,

59, 67, 97, 124, 127, 140, 150, 159, 169

on Dawes Plan, 125on disarmament, 126

Frederick the Great, 12Freytagh-Loringhoven, Axel von, 172Fritsch, Milka, 75, 147–8Fritzsche, Peter, xii, 4Frobenius, Else, 121, 162, 170, 171Frobenius, Hermann, 33

Garnich, Lotte, 75, 98–9Gellately, Robert, 157German Christian Movement, 160,

161, 165, 166, 174German League Against the

Emancipation of Women, 54, 62n26

German Protective League for theGermans on the Borders andAbroad, 121

German Rentiers’ League, 108, 109,112

German Women’s Committee for theStruggle against the War-Guilt Lie,see war guilt

German Young Women’s Service, 37,77

Germanic women, 120, 165Gestapo, 171–2Gewerkverein der Heimarbeiterinnen,

see home workers

– 227 –

Index


Gierke, Anna von, 7, 27, 41–2n19, 58,108

Glaubensgemeinschaft DeutscheChristen, see German Christian Movement

Goebbels, Joseph, 164, 172Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 95Goltz, Rüdiger von der, 97Groeben, Clotilde von der, 54, 141–2,

147Großdeutsche Volkspartei, ix, 121Günther, Hans K. F., 167

Haas, Lisbeth, 146Hamburg, 38, 146, 148Hamel, Ilse, 90–1, 127, 167, 172Helfferich, Karl, 13Hergt, Oskar, 25, 30, 55Herschel, Olga, 148Hertwig-Bünger, Doris, 67, 69, 71, 87Hess, Rudolf, 170Heyl, Hedwig, 75Hielscher-Panthen, Elsa, 75Hindenburg, Paul von, 121, 128, 129,

157venerated by right-wing women,

13, 128, 161, 162, 163, 167Hindenberg-Delbrück, Bertha, 75,

126Hitler, Adolf

cult of, 13, 161, 166–7on women’s rights, 160

Hobsbawm, Eric, 12Hoffmann, Adolf, 26Hoffmann(-Bochum), Hedwig, 60, 70,

75Hofmann-Göttig, Joachim, 26Hölzel, Minna, 145home workers, 25, 28, 73housewives, 30, 65, 73–77, 85, 119,

123, 137, 142, 145, 149, 183

differences between rural and urban, 5

DNVP and, 9, 38, 75DVP and, 8, 38, 75effect of World War I on, 3, 74leaving BDF, 129relation to domestic employees,

72rural, 5, 74–7urban, 5, 8, 73–7

housing, 86, 87, 88Hugenberg, Alfred, 127–9, 145,

169–70, 172as party leader, 9, 59, 127, 165,

166venerated by DNVP women, 13,

166–7, 175n4women’s response to his new

course, 158, 175n4

illegitimate children, 69–70, 87, 89,160

Independent Socialists (USPD), 23,24, 26–7, 122, 143

inflation, 13, 35, 108–10impact on women’s activism, 31,

33, 35, 137, 139, 147International Alliance of Women for

Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, 127, 129

International Council of Women, 28,96, 130

Italy, 76, 170

Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 96Jecker, Maria, 75Jews, 27, 90, 92, 94, 124, 126, 162,

167, 168, 169, 184Volksgemeinschaft and, 6–7see also anti-Semitism

jury duty, see legal professions

– 228 –

Index


Kahl, Wilhelm, 67, 70–1, 99Kaiser, see Wilhelm IIKalähne, Anni, 49–50, 111, 141, 142Kapp, Wolfgang, 31Kardorff, Siegfried von, 34–5Kardorff-Oheimb, Katharina von, x,

91, 120biography, 34–35longing for a male leader, 12political training courses for

women, 34–5, 119Katholischer deutscher Frauenbund,

xi, 39Kaufmann, Doris, 2Kershaw, Ian, 157Keudell, Walter von, 92Kindergarten, 87, 89Klingspor, Anni, 150Klotz, Klara, 55, 91, 95, 99Königin-Luise-Bund, see Bund

Königin LuiseKoonz, Claudia, 85KPD, see CommunistsKreuzzeitung, 54–5Kühn, Lenore, 54–5, 58, 74, 172

biography, 32–3Kulesza, Anny von, 3, 69, 98, 161,

164, 171

Lange, Else, 49, 50, 57Lange, Helene, 3, 27, 50, 57–8, 151League of German Women

Physicians, 171League of Nations, 50, 94, 124, 126legal professions, 70–1Lehmann, Annagrete, 56, 92, 139,

150, 172anti-Slavic rhetoric, 90committee on war guilt, 37critique of women’s solidarity, 59encouraging racism, 91, 168

on foreign policy, 120, 127, 128, 129

on Nazi takeover, 169–70on school issues, 93–4on small rentiers, 108–9, 110on the connection between

declining birthrate and atheism, 89

on the dissolution of the family in the Soviet Union, 89

on women’s committees, 32, 145, 159

Lindequist, Elsa von, 167Löbe, Paul, 112Locarno, Treaty of, 12, 126, 129Löwenstein, Kurt, 94Ludendorff, Erich, 121Luise, queen of Prussia, 11–12, 13,

140, 149see also Bund Königin Luise

Lürßen, Elisabeth, 161Luther, Hans, 129Luther, Martin, 92

Magnus-von Hausen, Frances, 53Marelle, Luise, 51Margis, Hilde, 57, 75–6marriage, 66, 67, 68–70, 87–9, 90,

147, 168, 173threat to, 26, 86

maternalism, 3, 107, 117–18, 130,185

Matz, Elsa, 53, 57, 67, 97, 150, 157–8and Nazism, 164, 170–1biography, 37on anti-Semitism, 162on birthrate, 86on black horror, 122on foreign policy, 119, 129on physical education and sports,

96

– 229 –

Index


on small rentiers, 111–13on schools, 92–3, 94on women in the civil service,

69role in film censorship, 98

Mayer, Anna, 59, 66, 71, 147Mende, Clara, 53, 58, 66, 146, 150

and Nazism, 171biography, 33–4committee on war guilt, 37critique of female egoism, 60on Black Horror, 122on demobilization, 67on foreign policy, 118–19, 119–21,

125, 127, 130on housewives, 74–6on National School Bill, 93on prohibition in the United States,

96on women in the civil service, 69

Meyer, Else, 166, 168midwives, 28, 30, 71–3, 141Mießner, Otto, 138–9Moldenhauer, Paul, 34Mueller-Otfried, Paula, x, 54, 56, 97,

125, 139, 168, 169, 172and Black Horror, 123–4biography, 36–7critique of Hitler cult, 166–7joining DNVP, 36on alcohol abuse, 95on married women in the civil

service, 69–70on representation of women in the

parties, 30, 58on small rentiers, 107, 109–11rejection of women’s party, 58voting for women’s access to legal

professions, 70Mühsam-Werther, Charlotte, 75Müller(-Franken), Hermann, 127

Mütterhilfe Wanderkorb, 149, 150,151, 171, 173–4

Mumm, Reinhard, 99Mussolini, Benito, 76, 171

naked dances, 93, 94Napoleon I, 11–12, 96National Economic Council, 34, 75National Liberal Party, 8, 33National Rural League, 55National Völkisch Committee of the

DNVP, 7, 91, 168Nationalliberale Correspondenz, 34,

86, 112, 122critique of Nazis, 160, 161, 162–3,

164Navy League of German Women, 37Neumann, Ilse, 165, 169Noack, Ilse-Charlotte, 88, 98–9, 140NSDAP

criticized for its anti-feminism, 160–1, 164, 165–6, 172–3, 183, 185

small rentiers voting for, 107, 113violence of, 137, 157, 158, 159,

164, 166, 169, 174, 185Volksgemeinschaft idea of, 90,

161–2, 167, 185voting for dismissal of married

women in the civil service, 69

NS-Frauenschaft, 170, 171NS-Volkswohlfahrt, 170Nürnberg Laws, 169

Olberg, 30–1Oheimb, Katharina von, see Kardorff-

Oheimb, Katharina von

Pan-Germans, Pan-German League,50, 166, 167, 168

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Papen, Franz von, 94, 158Papendieck, Clara, 142Peukert, Detlev, 10physical education, see sportsPlath, Lotte, 140Pleimes, Henny, 164Poehlmann, Margarethe, 51, 57, 73,

94, 95, 98–9building up women’s committees in

East Prussia, 147–8Poland, 7, 76, 118, 126, 130

birthrate in, 89–90, 130threat to East German border, 50,

89, 123, 129, 130, 141police force, female, 71Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der

Frauen von Groß-Berlin, 59, 148

Pomerania, 9, 37, 94, 111local women’s committees, 31–2,

140, 145, 183Porembsky, Alexa von, 166, 167, 169,

184postal workers, 68–70Prilipp, Beda, 55prostitution, 71, 98, 122Prussia

female police in, 71government of, 8, 88, 94, 158,

162–3Landtag elections of 1919, 24, 28Landtag elections of 1921, 52Landtag elections of 1924, 53,

55–6Landtag elections of 1928, 56

racial hygiene, 102n36, 117, 165, 167, 169, 173, 181n83

see also eugenicsracism, 76, 118, 122, 124, 130, 162,

185

DNVP and, 6–7, 10, 28, 88, 89,90–1, 99, 117, 124, 165–9, 174, 183

see also National VölkischCommittee and völkischwomen’s activists

Rahmlow, Käthe, 53Reagin, Nancy, xii, 151Rechenberg, Freda von, 75Reichsbund der Kinderreichen, see

children-rich familiesReichslandbund, see National Rural

LeagueRFA, see women’s committeesRichter, Johanna, 7, 169Ripke-Kühn, Lenore, see Kühn,

LenoreRötger, Asta, 36, 145Rogge-Börner, Pia-Sophie, 172Rosenberg, Alfred, 160Ruhr Occupation, 95, 123, 124, 142

Saxony, 71, 73, 75, 119, 159Schäfer, Dietrich, 50Scheidel, Ulrike, 92, 97, 98, 126Schiele, Martin, 97Schirmacher, Käthe, x, 50, 142

anti-Semitism, 7biography, 27–8conflict with Traub, 57losing her parliamentary seat, 57in National Assembly, 27on housewives, 73on Queen Luise, 12racism, 28, 90–1, 124, 165, 172, 184struggle against Versailles, 123,

124, 127, 128Schleker, Klara, 28Schleswig-Holstein, 111, 137

and DVP women’s committees, 35–6, 111, 145–7, 148, 150, 183

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Schmeling, Max, 96Schmitt, Carl, 181–2n92Scholz-Klink, Gertrud, 171schools, 11, 37, 91–5, 141, 167, 170,

171girls’ schools, 94–5, 171National School Bill, 92–3, 110

Schott, Maria, 75, 77, 125Schreiber, Adele, 59, 184Schumann, Robert, 148Schwarz, Martha, 35, 129, 162–3

critique of anti-feminism, 53, 159, 164

Schwarze Schmach, see Black Horroron the Rhine

Siegert, Marie, 53Silesia, 35, 73, 75

DNVP women in Lauban district, 138–9, 140

see also Upper SilesiaSoviet Union, 26, 89–90SPD, 23, 26–7, 52, 89, 127, 163, 173,

184and women’s suffrage, 24in Prussian government, 8, 88, 94,

158on abortion, 87on domestic employees, 72on eugenics, 88on midwives, 72–3on small rentiers, 110, 112voting for dismissal of married

women in the civil service, 69

Sperber, Else von, 66, 75, 76, 125,140–2

spiritual motherhood, 3, 11, 130, 161,165

Spohr, Elisabeth, 28, 66, 73, 88, 98–9, 139

against abortion, 89

defending women’s professional rights, 67

editor of Frauenkorrespondenz, 33on alcohol abuse, 95on foreign policy, 123, 125, 128on small rentiers, 108, 109on women in the police, 71welcoming the Nazi takeover, 169

sports, 11, 37, 96–7Stahlhelm, 12, 162–3Stahlhelm referendum for the

dissolution of the Prussian Landtag,140, 162–3

Stalin, Joseph, 90Stoecker, Adolf, 25Storost, Martha, 88Strasser, Gregor, 161Stresemann, Gustav, 12, 171

as foreign minister , 8, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129

as party leader, 9, 38responding to anti-feminism, 50–1,

52, 53, 57–8, 60venerated by DVP women, 13, 161,

167Stropp, Emma, 2, 59, 91

critique of anti-feminism, 51–2, 58

on foreign policy, 119–20, 121, 122, 124, 125

Süchting-Hänger, Andrea, ix, xii, 12Szagunn, Ilse, 148–9, 171, 184

on abortion, 87, 88on anti-feminism in the DVP, 50

teachers, 37, 92, 98, 161, 167teaching as women’s profession, 5,

10, 68, 91, 94–5, 143, 149Tiling, Magdalene von, x, 65, 92,

124–5, 166, 168, 169, 172as chair of the VEFD, 37, 172

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on girls’ schools, 94–5on National School Bill, 92–3warning against a decline of the

German population, 90trash and dirt, 97–8, 183Traub, Gottfried, 57

Ulbrich, Else, 145, 175n4United States, 96, 97, 122Unsere Partei, 169Upper Silesia, 123, 141Usborne, Cornelie, 5, 97USPD, see Independent Socialists

Vaterländischer Frauenverein, 23VEFD, 26, 36–7, 172Verdun, 126Verein für das Deutschtum im

Ausland, 37Versailles, Treaty of

disarmament clauses, 126, 129fight of right-wing women against,

117–30, 183see also war guilt charge

Vietinghoff-Scheel, Leopold von, 168Voigt, Jane, 111–12, 118, 145–6Voigtländer, Emmy, 118, 120völkisch women’s activists (or

völkisch feminists), 90–1, 165, 172, 173, 183

Völkischer Reichsausschuss, seeNational Völkisch Committee of theDNVP

Volksgemeinschaft, ix, 2–7, 9, 141, 148, 161–2, 164, 183, 184–5

and women’s rights, 65family as cornerstone of, 85racial and non-racial definition of,

17n31, 17n32, 90, 99, 162, 167, 185

small rentiers issue and, 113women’s party as representation of,

58Voß, Hanny, 75Voß-Zietz, Martha, 75–6VRPT, see postal workers

war criminals, suspected, 117, 121war guilt charge, 94, 117, 118, 123,

127, 129Dawes Plan and, 125women’s efforts to refute, 37, 120,

126, 127, 130, 141Young Plan and, 128

Watter, Helene von, 89–90, 97Weimar Constitution, 8, 68, 69, 92

clause on equality of women, 39, 51, 58, 66, 183

Weltbühne, 170Westarp, Emma von, 25Westarp, Kuno von, 25, 54, 55Westphalia, 53, 137, 142, 148, 150–1Wilhelm II, German emperor and

king of Prussia, 4, 11, 13, 117, 138,140

Wolf, Gertraud, 67, 94, 95–6, 129Wolff, Margarethe, 25, 175n4women’s committees, 9, 37, 51

in DNVP, 56, 138–45, 150–1build-up, 23, 25–6, 28–30, 32function, 29–31, 38–9

in DVP, 146–51build-up, 33–6function, 33–4, 38–9

Women’s League of the GermanColonial Society, 37, 170

women’s party, 57–9, 159women’s suffrage, 49, 54, 65

introduction of, 1, 24, 60, 163World War I

demographic impact, 3, 97

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impact on women, 1, 73, 117, 151, 185

see also Verdun and war guiltWrede, Irmgard, 167, 171–2, 184Württemberg, 55, 91, 95, 145

Young Plan, 127–8, 163

Zahn-von Harnack, Agnes, 38Zentrumspartei, see Center PartyZietz, Luise, 122

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mothers of the nation: right-wing women in weimar germany

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