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The Tears of 1939: German women and the emotional archive of the First World War
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 PressVolume
227Pages
183.0Book title
Total war: an emotional historyPlace of publication
OxfordISBN
9780197266663Series
Proceedings of the British AcademyDepartment affiliated with
- History Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Editors
Claudia Siebrecht, Lucy Noakes, Claire LanghamerLegacy Posted Date
2019-06-20First Open Access (FOA) Date
2022-01-29First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2019-06-19Usage metrics
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