Nurturing the New Republic: The Contested Feminization of Law Enforcement in Weimar Culture

Abstract

Like many histories of the culture of the Weimar Republic, studies of that era’s police forces tend to characterize the German interwar experience as a quest for a stable relationship between a struggling, paternalistic state and a disoriented, restless, and questioning populace. Few would dispute the fact that the tumult of war, revolution, and economic disaster spelled out personal displacement and social disorientation for many middle-class men and that the largely male police force served as a lightning rod for his interactions with a self-legitimating state authority. However, as recent scholarship has demonstrated, these portrayals of Weimar culture, as bound in an Oedipal struggle over political authority and individual integrity, have ignored the particular contributions and experiences of the women living among the men whose stories are told.² This is no less true for the historiography of policing practices at the time.³

The research for this article was assisted by a grant from the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies 1998–1999, jointly administered by the Freie Universität Berlin and the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Land Berlin.