Surviving Hitler's War

Surviving Hitler's War: Family Life in Germany 1939–48 . By Hester Vaizey . Palgrave Macmillan . 2010 . xiii + 252 pp. £18.99 . Hester Vaizey's study examines family life, marital relations and relations between parents and children with a particular focus on the immediate post-Second World War years. Through a detailed examination of diary entries and letters, she presents a compelling picture of voices and emotions expressed in these private documents. In her introduction, Vaizey comments on the challenges her sources might pose when she outlines arguments pointing to the constructive nature of letters. Acknowledging these potential limitations, she shows convincingly throughout her study how much there is to be gained from using ego documents. Furthermore, Surviving Hitler's War illustrates the strength of family ties and family life in a decade in which keeping the family together was a difficult task. Divided into five chapters, the study concentrates on the period from 1939 to 1948, showing that the end of the war often did not spell an end to the separation of couples and families. In fact, sometimes waiting for returning husbands and fathers created new anxieties and uncertainties. After a general summary of family life in the Third Reich in the first chapter, Hester Vaizey's case studies are presented in the following four chapters. The second chapter examines the difficulties of keeping communications going when couples were separated during wartime. Delays in letter deliveries, censorship, restriction on the number of letters that could be sent and individual choices not to retell the difficulties, problems and sometimes horror encountered made the writing and reading of letters a less than straightforward business. But while corresponding via letters could hardly be an adequate surrogate for face-to-face communication, some couples found, as Vaizey shows in her second and third chapters, that letters allowed them to express their love for each other more strongly. As part of the third chapter, the focus of the study shifts to the post-war years and to problems faced by couples who were still separated owing to men's imprisonment in PoW camps. For those who were reunited fairly quickly after the end of the war, switching from letter-writing to living together was not always a smooth process. Expectations on both sides were left disappointed when the partner did not measure up to the glorified image created in the years of separation. Despite these difficulties, Hester Vaizey convincingly rejects the notion frequently portrayed in Trümmerliteratur that post-1945 Germany had turned into a country of estranged couples. More often than not, initial irritations could be overcome and husbands and wives found ways of getting used to each other again. Sometimes the years apart strengthened the relationship rather than weakened it. Chapter 4 continues the examination of marital relationships after 1945 and focuses on the role of women. Taking the image of the strong Trümmerfrau, who cleared away the rubble in Germany's bombed cities and became the embodiment of German recovery, as her starting point, Vaizey questions its accuracy. She shows that a majority of women were not particular keen on this new-found independence, but would have preferred to share the burden and hardship of the difficult post-war years with their partners. Despite the necessity of coping on their own, many women did not find that their roles had changed and happily opted again for the traditional gender divide as soon as possible. In the last, and fifth, chapter the book focuses on children's relations to their parents and how they reacted to years of separation and to post-war reunions. Again we are presented with a nuanced picture of fathers and children's difficulties to relate to each other as well as with families who were quickly able to pick up the closeness and emotional bonds they had experienced before. Children and their well-being, behaviour and achievements at school did play an important part in letters between couples. Some fathers wrote directly to their children, others asked their wives for detailed descriptions on the children's activities and offered parental guidance. Hester Vaizey rightly gives much space to her sources. She resists the temptations to shorten these sometimes lengthy quotations as they are one of the main assets of the book. Her narrative does not suffocate but strengthen the presentation of her material, which often portrays a very touching image of suffering, endurance, love and resilience. In some ways this is also one of the weaknesses of the study. While Vaizey makes a convincing case for looking in more nuanced ways at the alleged ‘hour of women’ after the Second World War as well as the notion of the family in crisis, a more analytical approach examining these public discourses would have helped to set them in contrast with the letters and diary entries presented. There are references to post-1945 politicians, especially to Franz-Josef Würmerling, as well as to women's magazines, but the types of discourse constructed by them are only mentioned in passing. Nevertheless, Hester Vaizey's Surviving Hitler's War is a very touching book, reminding us of the power of letter-writing and carefully unfolding, page after page, the voices of those who were hoping to keep their families and marriages intact in years of separation and hardship

Censorship · Dissent · Family life · Political science · Politics · Sociology · World War II · Classics · European history and politics · Gender Studies · German History and Society · History · Law