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Of Fernweh and Fleabites: German Female Journalists in Pursuit of Adventure, 1937–1942

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 December 2023

Katharina Friege Open the ORCID record for Katharina Friege [Opens in a new window]
Katharina Friege*
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University of Oxford, UK
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Email: katharina.friege@history.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article opens up new perspectives on gendered experiences of the Nazi era by exploring three individual women as case studies for subjective interpretations of German nationalism and modernity in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It focuses on Liselotte Purper, Ilse Steinhoff, and Margret Boveri, all of them journalists and photographers from Germany who sought adventure abroad and published books and articles about their trips back home. They were independent, hardworking, and pro-Nazi regime, though their professional and political principles played out differently. In tracing how these three women navigated and narrated their international journeys, I highlight that their quest for adventure, like those of others with a similar propensity for travel, involved primarily the pursuit of independence, individuality, and historical relevance. The range of their experiences and interpretations further draws attention to the complex relationship between collective identity and individual subjectivity under Nazism.

Keywords

gendersubjectivitytraveljournalismNazi Germany
Type
Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , December 2023 , pp. 573 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association

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References

1 Hertas Beruf was written by Ilse-Dore Tanner and formed part of the Kränzchen-Bibliothek series. Compare Protte, Katja, “Bildberichterstatterin” im “Dritten Reich”—Fotografien aus den Jahren 1937 bis 1944 von Liselotte Purper, DHM Magazin, vol. 20 (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 1997), 3Google Scholar.

2 The Deutsches Frauenwerk (German Women's Enterprise) was a combine that, in the context of Gleichschaltung (or coordination), served as a structured organization for women's associations and women's groups to join and be subordinate to. It published a magazine Frauenkultur im Deutschen Frauenwerk between 1935 and 1941. Stephenson, Jill, The Nazi Organisation of Women (London: Routledge, 1981), 17–19, 130–46Google Scholar.

3 Protte, “Bildberichterstatterin” im “Dritten Reich,” 4–5, 9.

4 The Reichsarbeitsdienst was a state organization and component of the National Socialist economy. Beginning in 1935 all young men were required to complete six months of compulsory labor; in 1939 this was extended to include young women as well. Usually, the work was on civil engineering projects or in agriculture.

5 Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM), Berlin, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1849, Liselotte Purper, “Letter to Kurt Orgel, Berlin,” October 2, 1942. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

6 For an analytically related engagement of subjectivity, wherein the connections between cultural media and individual experiences are speculatively probed, here in the context of Nazi ideology and personal photograph albums, see Umbach, Maiken, “Selfhood, Place, and Ideology in German Photo Albums, 1933–1945,” Central European History 48 (2015): 335–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 On the history of independent female travel and travel writing, compare Lawrence, Karen, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Holland, Patrick and Huggan, Graham, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 111–56Google Scholar; and Bassnett, Susan, “Travel Writing and Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Hulme, Peter and Youngs, Tim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 225–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 In the context of Nazi Germany, Moritz Föllmer argues for “multiple” and “alternative” individualities and rejects both a teleological reading of individuality in the context of modernity as well as a strict dichotomy between the individual and the collective. Föllmer, Moritz, “Was Nazism Collectivistic? Redefining the Individual in Berlin, 1930–1945,” The Journal of Modern History 82 (2010): 66–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ilse Steinhoff's work was also published in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, the Illustrierter Beobachter, and the Zürcher Illustrierte, to name some further examples, for example, see Steinhoff, Ilse, “Die Weltstadt in der Steppe,” Zürcher Illustrierte 14, no. 49 (1938): 1502–03Google Scholar.

10 Boveri, Margret, Ein Auto, Wüsten, blaue Perlen. Bericht über eine Fahrt durch Vorderasien (Zürich: Atlantis, 1939)Google Scholar. On this particular trip, compare also Görtemaker, Heike B., Ein deutsches Leben. Die Geschichte der Margret Boveri (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005), 99–112Google Scholar.

11 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entries,” October 29 to December 5, 1940.

12 On Steinhoff's photography and a postcolonial German imagination of Africa, compare Willeke Sandler, “Deutsche Heimat in Afrika: Colonial Revisionism and the Construction of Germanness through Photography,” Journal of Women's History 25, no. 1 (2013), 37–61. Elizabeth Harvey included both Ilse Steinhoff and Liselotte Purper in her chapter, “Seeing the World: Photography, Photojournalism and Visual Pleasure in the Third Reich,” in Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany, ed. Swett, Pamela, Corey Ross, and Fabrice d'Almeide (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 177–204. On Liselotte Purper's career, and especially the way in which Purper presented war as an opportunity for adventure, compare also Elizabeth Harvey, “Ich war überall. Die NS Propagandaphotographin Liselotte Purper,” in Volksgenossinnen: Frauen in der NS-Volksgemeinschaft, ed. Sybille Steinacher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 138–53. For a transnational and comparative reading of Margret Boveri's travel writing from the Middle East, compare Gonçalo Vilas-Boas, “Travellers to Persia in the Thirties: Maud von Rosen, Robert Byron and Margret Boveri,” Cademos de Literatura Comparada 14–15, no. 1 (2006): 119–44.

13 A telling example of this can be found in Jo Burr Margadant's edited collection, which highlights the way select French women individually crafted selfhood and femininity to suit their own needs in a way that made them successfully stand out. Jo Burr Margadant, ed., The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

14 This was true of journalism in the 1930s, where approximately one in ten registered German journalists was a woman. Overall, the number of female journalists increased under Nazi rule. Deborah Barton, “Rewriting the Reich: German Woman Journalists as Transnational Mediators for Germany's Rehabilitation,” Central European History 51 (2018): 567–68. The modern woman, and especially her representation, also excited contemporary media interest. Her global reach is thematized in the following essay collection: Alys Eve Weinbaum et al., ed., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). For a study that investigates how women experienced cultural continuity and change between Weimar and Nazi Germany, especially in terms of modernity, media, and their own participation in the public sphere, compare Kate Lacey, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). On a widening range of permissible, even desirable, careers for women in Nazi public discourse, compare Föllmer, “Was Nazism Collectivistic?” 77–78.

15 This was especially evident in the media. On the “types” of modern women in Weimar Germany and the reiterative co-construction of the “New Woman” by press and readership alike, compare Jochen Hung, “The Modernized Gretchen: Transformations of the ‘New Woman’ in the Late Weimar Republic,” German History 33, no. 1 (2015): 52–79.

16 As in the work on Steinhoff, Purper, and Boveri cited previously. Other relevant illustrations of this point include Kate Lacey's discussion of the radio broadcaster Carola Hersel in Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 85–95, and Lora Wildenthal's contextualization of Clara Brockmann's colonial experiences in “‘She Is the Victor’: Bourgeois Women, Nationalist Identities, and the Ideal of the Independent Woman Farmer in German Southwest Africa,” Social Analysis 33 (1993): 68–88.

17 For a discussion of subjectivity, gender, and the bias of their “external” construction, compare Michael Roper, “Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History,” History Workshop Journal 59, no. 1 (2005): 57–72.

18 Föllmer has traced a similar spirit in his study of how Germans living in Berlin demanded to be recognized as individuals from the Weimar years through Nazism and into the Cold War. He argues that this core demand remained constant across democratic and totalitarian regimes. Moritz Föllmer, Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

19 Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic. The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Yang, 1993), 95–100, 275–78; Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: University Press, 2005), 2–5.

20 Ilse Steinhoff, Deutsche Heimat in Afrika. Ein Bildbuch aus unseren Kolonien, 2nd ed., ed. Reichskolonialbund (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert-Verlag, 1941), unpaginated.

21 On the modern aesthetic of Nazi portrait photography as informed by a Weimar avant-garde, and on the cultural continuity of physiognomic theory in relation to nationhood, compare Leesa Rittelmann, “Facing Off: Photography, Physiognomy, and National Identity in the Modern German Photobook,” Radical History Review 106 (2010): 137–61.

22 See, for example, her discussion of race car driver Clärenore Stinnes. Katharina Kellermann, Herrinnen der Technik zwischen 1918 und 1945. Selbstinszenierung—Funktionalisierung—Einschreibung ins deutsche kulturelle Gedächtnis (Bamberg, Germany: University of Bamberg Press, 2017), 12–14, 75–77, 86–89.

23 Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity, 116–57; Bernhard Rieger, “Hanna Reitsch (1912–1979): The Global Career of a Nazi Celebrity,” German History 26, no. 3 (2008), 387. On Elly Beinhorn as a model “individual” modern woman, compare Föllmer, Individuality and Modernity in Berlin, 58.

24 Anke Hertling, “‘Angriff auf eine Männerdomäne,’ Autosportlerinnen in den zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren,” Feministische Studien 30, no. 1 (2012): 12–13.

25 Irmela von der Lühe, Erika Mann, Eine Biographie (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 77–79; Hertling, “Angriff auf eine Männerdomäne,” 12.

26 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1849, Liselotte Purper, “Letter to Kurt Orgel,” March 22, 1943.

27 For example, while traveling to the ethnic German village of Cogealac in northern Dobruja, Purper described a group of travelers in highly romanticized, cinematic terms, concluding that “any film director would give much for such a well-costumed type. We [had] to get out and take photographs.” DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” November 11, 1940.

28 On Leni Riefenstahl's postwar photography in Africa, compare Alexandra Ludewig, “Leni Riefenstahl's Encounter with the Nuba. In Search of the Sublime,” Interventions 8, no. 1 (2006): 83–101, and George Paul Meiu, “Riefenstahl on Safari. Embodied Contemplation in East Africa,” Anthropology Today 24, no. 2 (2008): 18–22.

29 Margret Boveri, Ein Auto, Wüsten, blaue Perlen. Bericht über eine Fahrt durch Vorderasien, 22-–36.

30 Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB), Berlin, Nachlass Boveri, 9.1, Margret Boveri, “Rundbrief Ankara,” March 24 and 30, 1938.

31 Steinhoff, Deutsche Heimat in Afrika.

32 Ute Eskildsen, “A Chance to Participate: A Transitional Time for Women Photographers,” in Visions of the “Neue Frau”: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany, ed. Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 62–63. On the ways in which the camera facilitated the exploration of a transformative self, compare Elizabeth Otto, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 104–26.

33 Note that the NS-Frauenwarte was a party-approved women's magazine put out by the NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the NSDAP, and that Frauenkultur was the women's magazine affiliated with the Deutsches Frauenwerk. On Purper's publications, compare Harvey, “Seeing the World,” 178–79.

34 Shelley Baranowski has looked at how tourism and consumer culture were integrated into Nazi ideology and popular practice through the institution Kraft durch Freude (KdF) (Strength through Joy) where she illustrates how KdF tourism overlapped with racialized German attitudes and connected German military expansion to popular consumption under Nazism. Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

35 Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 119–45.

36 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entries,” November 4, 1940.

37 Such as in a collection of private photographs taken between 1938–1944. DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung und Bildarchiv, uncatalogued, “Er + Sie von 1938 bis 1944.”

38 Liselotte Purper was traveling with her close friend, the filmmaker Margot Monnier, a frequent companion on her trips abroad.

39 Steinhoff, Deutsche Heimat in Afrika.

40 Lora Wildenthal, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 278–81.

41 Ilse Steinhoff, Deutsche Heimat in Afrika.

42 Sandler, “Deutsche Heimat in Afrika,” 43.

43 On Boveri's career trajectory, 1934–1945, compare Görtemaker, Ein deutsches Leben, 63–210.

44 Görtemaker, Ein deutsches Leben, 95–100.

45 SBB, Nachlass Boveri, 9.1, Margret Boveri, “Rundbrief Beirut,” May 5, 1938; “Rundbrief Damaskus, Rest Haven,” May 7, 1938; “Rundbrief Maude Hotel, Bagdad”, May 11, 1938.

46 Boveri Ein Auto, Wüsten, blaue Perlen. Bericht über eine Fahrt durch Vorderasien, 148–50.

47 SBB, Nachlass Boveri, 3.2; Margret Boveri, “Die Probleme Vorderasiens,” Volk und Reich 7 (1939): 521–27; “Von blauen Perlen, Aberglauben und vielen Wassern,” Atlantis 10, no. 9 (1938): 509–24. Margret Boveri, Vom Minarett zum Bohrturm. Eine politische Biographie Vorderasiens (Zürich: Atlantis, 1938); Boveri, Ein Auto, Wüsten, blaue Perlen. Bericht über eine Fahrt durch Vorderasien.

48 Margret Boveri, Verzweigungen. Eine Autobiographie, ed. Uwe Johnson (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 321.

49 Görtemaker, Ein deutsches Leben, 111.

50 Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA), Marbach am Neckar, A: Mohler, Briefe 1999.01, Margret Boveri, “Letter to Armin Mohler, Höfen,” October 7, 1954.

51 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1849, Liselotte Purper, “Letter to Kurt Orgel, Berlin,” February 22, 1943.

52 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” November 6, 1940.

53 This quotation is from a typed version of her diary, which Purper revised and edited. DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1862, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” 9 November 1940. In the original, she wrote: “So I had to resort to my “womanly weapons … I seized on them successfully and reclaimed my camera.” DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” November 9, 1940.

54 Nancy Reagin, “The Imagined Hausfrau: National Identity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in Imperial Germany,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 1 (2001): 67, 80–81.

55 Steinhoff, Deutsche Heimat in Afrika.

56 Steinhoff, Deutsche Heimat in Afrika.

57 Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 9, 172–77, 201–02.

58 Steinhoff, “Die Weltstadt in der Steppe,” 1502–03.

59 Jürgen Kocka, “Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit als Probleme der deutschen Geschichte vom späten 18. Bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhunder,” in Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 42–49.

60 Harvey, Women and the Nazi East, 143–44.

61 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entries,” November 11 and 13, 1940.

62 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” November 12, 1940.

63 Through her work and travel, Purper as an individual lived out what Baranowski has more broadly described as the “fusion of pleasure and violence.” Baranowski, Strength through Joy, 10.

64 On a tour of Romania in 1942, she reflected, “Oh yes, Germany … is glorious! If only every German could once sit outside the Reich in a small village, or even in a cosmopolitan city, how much would he experience what Germany is and how gifted those are who call it home.” DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” June 29, 1942.

65 In early November 1944, approximately two weeks after Aachen was the first major German city to fall to the Allies, Purper uncritically echoed Nazi war propaganda and harshly condemned German refugees whom she had overheard speaking in a defeatist manner in a letter to Kurt Orgel, DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1849, Wittenberge, November 3, 1944.

66 For example, place DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Bildarchiv, 3104/12, Liselotte Purper, “Dorfschule in Cobadin,” which shows a local village school welcoming the arrival of the Reich Germans, next to DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Bildarchiv, 3121/5, Liselotte Purper, “Kinderwäsche an Bord eines Umsiedlerschiffes,” where a uniformed woman is demonstrating to settlers how to wash a baby in the proper way.

67 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” November 11, 1940.

68 SBB, Nachlass Boveri, 2.3; Margret Boveri, “Im eigenen Schmutz sich waschen?,” Frankfurter Zeitung, May 8, 1938; “Moslem gegen Moslem. Schiiten und Sunniten, Beduinen und Effendis im Irak,“ Frankfurter Zeitung, July 19, 1938; “Was will Frankreich in Syrien? Zwischen Mandat und Bündnis,“ Frankfurter Zeitung, July 7, 1938; and “Auf den Bahrein Inseln. Das Spiel um Oel und Macht im Persischen Gold,” Frankfurter Zeitung, August 7, 1938.

69 Compare, for example, SBB, Nachlass Boveri, 2.3; Margret Boveri, “Stadt der guten Laune. Wandlungen in Bagdad, der Hauptstadt des Iraks,” Frankfurter Zeitung, July 14, 1938; and “Überlieferung und rascher Wandel. Aufzeichnungen von einer Reise durch Iran,” Frankfurter Zeitung, August 17, 1938.

70 Boveri, Verzweigungen, 214–16.

71 Compare, for example, an early disagreement via correspondence with Doris Heider from the year 1933. Heider was the same friend who accompanied Boveri on her Middle East trip in 1938. In her letter, Boveri expresses cautious support for Adolf Hitler and Nazism. SBB, Nachlass Boveri, 2220, “Letter to Doris Heider, Vienna,” October 21, 1933.

72 Görtemaker, Ein deutsches Leben, 18–20.

73 Kocka, “Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit,” 28–30.

74 Görtemaker, Ein deutsches Leben, 21–23.

75 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” July 25, 1941.

76 Steinhoff, Deutsche Heimat in Afrika.

77 SBB, Nachlass Boveri, 9.1; Margret Boveri, “Rundbrief. Im Zelt, zwischen Bursa und Jenischehir,” March 24, 1938, 22.

78 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” November 15, 1940.

79 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” December 1, 1940.

80 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” November 20, 1940.

81 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung, Do2 96/1861, Liselotte Purper, “Diary Entry,” December 4, 1940.

82 Görtemaker, Ein deutsches Leben, 106.

83 DHM, Liselotte Orgel-Köhne Dokumentensammlung und Bildarchiv, Folder 4 (uncatalogued); Willy Stiewe, “Die Frau als Bildberichterstatterin,” 56–57.

84 Stiewe, “Die Frau als Bildberichterstatterin,” 55.

85 An early exception to this rule can be found in the colonial experiences of radical nationalist Frieda von Bülow. Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945, 62–69.

86 Stiewe, “Die Frau als Bildberichterstatterin,” 60.