Pilgrimages to the 'bleeding border

Gender and Rituals of Nationalist Protest in Germany, 1919-39

Bibliographic Data

ID4347607
AuthorsElizabeth Harvey (0000-0002-5639-6986, University of Liverpool, corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume9
Issue2
Pages201-229
Publication date2000-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWomen s History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0961-2025 • E-ISSN: 1747-583X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09612020000200246
OpenAlexW2062052529
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited10

German nationalist agitation during the Weimar Republic and under the Nazi regime routinely represented Germany as a violated body; Germany's post-Versailles borders with Poland were referred to as ‘bleeding borders’. To keep border issues in the public eye, nationalist organisations in Weimar Germany undertook ritualised excursions to the eastern borders; after 1933, such excursions continued under Nazi auspices. The article uses women's accounts of such border excursions to explore the constructions of gender that underlay the organisation of such journeys and which shaped the way in which the ‘border experience’ was recounted. It asks whether women's borderlands activism conformed to the common gender division of labour within nationalism (ascribing responsibility for cultural and welfare matters to women), or whether the ‘borderlands’ – constructed in the nationalist imagination as a zone of perpetual emergency and crisis – created a space for a more fluid conception of gender roles

Ancient history · German · Nationalism · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Weimar Republic · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law

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