Martial Spirit and Mobilization Myths: Bourgeois Women and the ‘Ideas of 1914’ in Germany

Abstract

This extract from a war pamphlet written by Gertrud Bäumer, leader of the ‘Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine’ (BDF), the umbrella organization of the German women’s movement, illustrates a reaction to the outbreak of war in August 1914 that was both emphatic and patriotic. The elevated language conveys an intense emotional response that was characteristic of the majority of women’s publications of the time. Leading members of the German women’s movement, among them, as well as Bäumer herself, Dr Agnes von Harnack, Dr Hanna Hellmann, Dr Elisabeth Altmann-Gottheiner and Helene Lange, invested much thought and effort into defining the relationship between women and war and explaining its historical dimension, generally concluding that women were indispensable to the war effort (Harnack 1915; Hellmann 1917; Lange 1914).

Yes, in these weeks in August, it was as if we women had entered a new world. Not only were we witnesses to the most powerful piece of history that mankind has ever experienced; we also discovered new depths within our own soul. All these great events: the experience of unity, the pulling together of the nation’s strength into one noble will, the heroic mood of our troops, the thousand and one small acts in which the great consciousness of our nation showed itself — to all of these our soul responded, and continues to respond every day — in sacred trembling, the depth and greatness of which we have never known before. No love, no matter how happy or sad it made us feel, no art, no matter how much it stirred us, no work and no happiness had ever made us feel this elevation. In us Germany speaks, feels and wills — our personal soul merges and rises within the soul of our nation.¹ (Bäumer 1914: 6–7)

I would like to thank the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Grace Lawless Lee Fund of Trinity College Dublin for supporting my research.