GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2004 by Timothy Schroer

GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany. By Maria Hohn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xv plus 337 pp. $22.50).

Maria Hohn provides a fascinating study of the encounter between Germans and the American military in the rural West German state of the Rhineland-Palatinate during the 1950s. The book focuses on developments in the small town of Baumholder and the city of Kaiserslautern, both of which hosted large concentrations of American troops. The local histories have broader significance because during the 1950s an anxious national debate arose concerning the perceived immorality that the American military brought to the towns. Hohn describes how "the seductions of the American way of life" (10) imported by the troops provoked a national moral panic over American influence in the new West German state.

Hohn begins by briefly sketching the history of Baumholder as a military base during the Third Reich and through the years of the French occupation after World War II. When in 1951 the United States embarked on a dramatic military build-up in Europe as tensions with the Soviet Union escalated, Baumholder experienced a sudden influx of American troops. The growing American presence brought an economic boom to the small town. Hohn effectively draws on oral histories and archival sources to describe the personal interactions between American GIs and Germans in Baumholder and Kaiserslautern. Despite instances of trouble, Hohn concludes that relations were "mostly cordial" (83). Beyond the economic prosperity that American dollars brought to the local economy, Hohn credits official efforts by the American military to act as good neighbors with winning over the Germans.

The most important American import to the local communities was the "American way of life," (75) a habitus not easily defined, but marked in Hohn's view by particular music, consumer goods, and a casual style. That American style proved appealing especially to the younger generation of Germans. Many Germans, however, regarded with disgust the loosening of morals that American money and manners seemed to bring. Religious conservatives responded with a campaign to forestall the spreading Americanization.

The book recounts an interesting and complex story of how the ensuing debate played out on the national, state, and local levels. At the heart of German concerns were relationships between German women and American GIs, and especially African-American soldiers. To conservative onlookers, the women who embraced not simply American soldiers, but equally the consumer goods they could provide, amounted to no better than prostitutes. Hohn carefully details how jurists and social welfare workers focused their attention on women who socialized with, or worked for, Americans. Social workers attempted to counter Americanization both by seeking to protect women from American influences and by invoking increasingly expansive definitions of prostitution to prosecute those women who succumbed to American temptations. Hohn argues that conservative clergy and social welfare workers "were able to use the alleged moral crisis" to advance a "conservative agenda" opposed to both sexual promiscuity and materialistic consumer culture, both of which conservatives identified with America (11).

Hohn offers a rich social history of the German-American encounter. She describes the milieu that emerged around the bases, including the bars that sprang up to cater to American GIs. Race contributed to a combustible mix of anxieties regarding the establishments, as a large number of the bar-owners were Jewish displaced persons, and the bars were segregated on a de facto basis for whites and blacks. Hohn discerns evidence of pervasive, but rarely openly expressed, antisemitism in the German discussion of the bar-owners. Without mentioning Jewish bar-owners specifically, some German commentators condemned bar-owners "'who could barely speak German and whose names [were] unpronounceable'" (211).

Hohn focuses considerable attention on analyzing relations between Germans and African Americans. She persuasively shows that most Germans across the political spectrum found sexual relationships between German women and African Americans to be repugnant. Women who associated with African Americans were more likely to be treated as prostitutes than women who associated with white soldiers. Hohn observes that Germans could draw "on the example of American racial segregation" in phrasing their own objections to relationships between German women and African Americans (86). Hohn's ultimate conclusions on the encounter between Germans and black Americans are fairly tentative. She describes her book as "a first effort to explore the complicated manner in which the German encounter with the American military might have Americanized traditional assumptions about race" (234).

The book's argument on this score is intriguing, but it seems doubtful that "Americanization" of German assumptions ultimately will be the most productive way to think about the German-American encounter on the subject of race. The term Americanization suggests a merely receptive role for Germans and imputes to America at once a homogeneity and an other-ness from Germany, none of which seems particularly apt on the subject of thinking about race. As Hohn suggests throughout her excellent study, the German-American encounter produced a transnational dialogue that ultimately influenced both American and German ideas about race.