University of Sussex
Browse
Siebrecht_Tears1939_SRO.pdf (271.11 kB)

The Tears of 1939: German women and the emotional archive of the First World War

Download (271.11 kB)
chapter
posted on 2023-06-09, 18:07 authored by Claudia SiebrechtClaudia Siebrecht
This chapter focuses on tearful reactions to the outbreak of war in 1939 as described and recalled by German women in diaries, memoirs and oral histories. Women who were at different life stages in 1939 offer nuanced and explicit testimonies of their emotional responses, which were predominantly framed with references to the First World War. Retained memories of bereavement and hardship are particularly striking and this chapter argues that both personal and familial experiences of the period between 1914 and 1918 were of key importance as they accumulated into an emotional archive. This emotional archive represented a crucial reference point for women to gauge a contemporaneous response to a political event - the outbreak of war in 1939. It also facilitated the construction of a personal stance and political positioning to war in a retrospective post-Second World War context. Women’s tears of 1939 therefore were about more than the outbreak of war, they were about owning and disowning different parts of their past.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Volume

227

Pages

183.0

Book title

Total war: an emotional history

Place of publication

Oxford

ISBN

9780197266663

Series

Proceedings of the British Academy

Department affiliated with

  • History Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Claudia Siebrecht, Lucy Noakes, Claire Langhamer

Legacy Posted Date

2019-06-20

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2022-01-29

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2019-06-19

Usage metrics

    University of Sussex (Publications)

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC