Schreiben statt Schweigen: Literarische Repräsentationen sexueller Gewalt in der Flucht- und Vertreibungsliteratur (1945-2021)

Abstract

At the end of World War II, according to some estimates, approximately one million German women were raped by Allied and Soviet soldiers. Many of these women experienced sexual violence while fleeing the eastern territories, such as Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia. For many decades, two taboos surrounded these horrid experiences: the notion of Germans as victims and the discussion of sexual violence against women. Literature, among other media, served to fill the unspoken gaps left in German society and history from 1945 to the present day. Through close readings of diaries, novels, films, and memoirs, this dissertation traces the representations of the rape of German women, highlighting how these depictions shifted due to political and societal changes. In the examined diaries from 1945, the women’s need to record the violence they experienced is evident. In the 1950s, however, narratives about the rape of German women during their flight from the East were instrumentalized as anti-communist propaganda in the Federal Republic of Germany, while such depictions were silenced and censored in the German Democratic Republic. In the 1970s and 1980s, several narratives on both sides of the wall adopted a humorous tone when depicting the sexual violence against women in 1945 and the postwar years. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, accounts of the rape of German women by Soviet and Allied soldiers shifted their focus to the generations born after the war. The texts framed rape in 1945 and the postwar years as a form of transgenerational trauma, a hidden yet persistent secret that profoundly shaped family life and intergenerational relations. Literary texts and films created a space of remembrance for the rape of German women at the end of World War II, making the unspeakable visible in ways that historical discourse has not been able of articulating.