different voices on armes deutschland

May 8: Germany has capitulated. It held out six years against a world of enemies, it will recover again (wieder hochkommen). . . .Dear God - Berlin has had to endure so much, let this be over with.

In May 1945, a middle-aged woman physician with excellent antifascist credentials, veteran of the Weimar campaigns for birth control and abortion reform, faced the defeat of Nazi Germany and the first press reports about Auschwitz and the death camps. She was not shocked or disbelieving; she could imagine and would not try to deny the horrors of which the Nazis were capable. Her response: to sigh for “poor Germany” (armes Deutschland) - an apparent victim - and look forward to the day when Germany - and especially her beloved metropolis Berlin - would revive (wieder hochkommen).

Five years later, in a 1950 report for the American Jewish journal Commentary on “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule,” Hannah Arendt diagnosed in Germans an “absence of mourning for the dead, or in the apathy with which they [Germans] react, or rather fail to react, to the fate of the refugees in their midst . . . a deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.”

The current ongoing debates and dilemmas about abortion in united Germany, in both the “new” and the “old” states of the Federal Republic, are shadowed and shaped by a long history of conflict. It is a history marked - at least since the inclusion of Paragraphs 218-20 (which criminalized most abortions) in the penal code of the new German Reich in 1871 -by continuous controversy and attempts at regulation, albeit with many different permutations. The story is punctuated by sharp breaks in policy under different political regimes, but also - and perhaps above all - by a continually selective conditional approach, in which attitudes to abortion were mainly determined not in terms of rights but by assessments of social and economic conditions as well as of individual “fitness” and “health.” This chapter sets a context for discussion of the present unclear situation by following briefly some continuities and shifts from the Weimar campaigns for the abolition of Paragraph 218 through the Third Reich and then into the multiple changes of the postwar period. It also argues a point that should be self-evident but that seemingly needs to be continually revisited, especially in light of the wealth of newly open archival material now accumulating: The lines of continuity - of social control and social anxiety - that so preoccupy historians of modern Germany, especially those concerned with medicine and hygiene, look different if one follows the history of German abortion and birth control politics into the post-World War II period and beyond a narrative concluded by the descent into National Socialism and the Holocaust.

For both male and female doctors the story of exile from Nazi Germany is one of loss of status and identity and painful, arduous reconstruction. The story of women's experiences, however, is highly complicated by gender. Like men, they confronted professional dis- and requalification. But they also faced intense gender discrimination in addition to prejudices against Jews and foreigners in the medical professions of their host countries. Furthermore, like all women émigrés, they were expected to provide material and emotional support for uprooted family and friends. A remarkable if minority group of refugee women did eventually return to the practice of medicine. However, the unique niche that female physicians had carved out for themselves in the Weimar medical profession proved virtually impossible to replace or re-create.

The focus on exile in this chapter structures a story that is necessarily partial and fragmented. The sources consist to a great extent of records of refugee aid organizations, memoirs, and oral histories. They capture only certain women at very particular moments in their lives. Memoirs were often written by women who assimilated least successfully and felt compelled to tell their bitter story.