Horizontal collaboration

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The head of a French woman accused of horizontal collaboration is shaved

Horizontal collaboration ( French: collaboration horizontal or neutral collaboration féminine , female collaboration ) emerged as a special form of the term collaboration after Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944 in France. He was referring to French women who were accused of having had sexual relations with German soldiers during the German occupation (1940-1944). After the war, he could also refer to the sexual relationships of French women with German men, those as prisoners of warz. B. worked for French farmers. In the meantime, the term has become part of the vocabulary in the relevant literature in the processing of the consequences of the German occupation in Northern and Western Europe.

history

Start of work-up after 50 years

The fact of "horizontal collaboration" has been withheld from the French public for decades - similar to all parts of Europe occupied by the Wehrmacht - by those involved or when perpetrators and victims have been raped (see also taboo "). In parts of Eastern Europe this remains silent until today.

In the 1990s (like everywhere else) France began to come to terms with the past throughout the country . From 2008 onwards, the French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner tried successfully at the diplomatic level in Berlin to have the enfants de Boches (“German children ”) recognized. You can now apply for German citizenship and thus obtain dual citizenship .

Collective revenge on women and occupation children

Marc Bergère from the University of Rennes 2 states that there was no social determinism that more or less spontaneously diagnosed “horizontal collaboration” in over 20,000 women and led to their hair being sheared. The decisive factor was the proximity to the occupier. It was not primarily about sexual contact with the Germans, but it was enough to have been an office worker, domestic help, cook, laundress, or in the hotel and restaurant trade or health service to be suspected of " Germanization ". Behind it stood the revival and glorification of male values ​​and male order that came about in the " Liberation " after June 6, 1944.

The situation was particularly problematic for women who really had a relationship with a German and from this relationship had children. Jean-Paul Picaper estimates the number of these children at 200,000. They were stigmatized like their mothers and were considered " enfants maudits " (= "damned children") similar to the children of German soldiers in Norway (see Tyskerbarn ) and Denmark . The mothers were exposed to a public spectacle, which often had a festive character, and after shaving their hair they could be smeared, undressed and exposed to the crowd on the street for mockery.
Since many of these women, in the spirit of opportunism for the sake of purely personal benefits, got involved in a sexual relationship with a member of the German Wehrmacht, many locals, including other women, viewed them as prostitutes. For Picaper, these processes show that in times of crisis women lose their “erotic self-determination” and their bodies become “national property”. If they choose the “wrong sexual partner”, after the liberation from the occupying power, the liberated will treat their bodies as if it were common property, and vengeance on them. This vengeance is of archaic origin, shows up again and again in history in corresponding situations and is also biblically transmitted with Samson , who lost his individual strength with the loss of his hair. The shearing of French women was supposed to expel them from the national community, drive them out of bourgeois society and "emasculate" them. Therefore, the children born by them could only be considered "cursed", because actually they should only have given birth to children of French men and should now, ostracized and "deseminated", never give birth again.

On the German side, Klaus Theweleit follows a similar line of thought on the “nationalization” of the woman's body in the foreword to Ebba D. Drolshagen's book “ Not scot-free ” (1998) on the basis of the results gathered in his studies from 1977/78 on male fantasies in nationalism and fascism in times of crisis.

Poetry, chanson, comic and film

In 1944 Paul Éluard wrote his poem Comprenne qui voudra, which struggled for understanding (= "Understand whoever wants to"). Georges Brassens dedicated a song on his 1964 album Les copains d'abord to someone who had been cut : La tondue .

The shearing of women was seen twice in notable French films long before public reappraisal began: for the first time in 1959 as a central motif in Hiroshima, mon amour by Alain Resnais based on the screenplay by Marguerite Duras, and in 1967 in the final scene by Claude Berris Der old man and the child ( Le Vieil homme et l'enfant ).

In 2009 the topic arrived in the comic with L'Enfant Maudit , Volume 1: Les Tondues by Arno Monin and Laurent Galandon (Volume 2: La marque O 2012).

  • Film: Enemy Child. My father was a German soldier . Documentation Susanne Freitag & Claudia Döbber. Transmitter Phoenix , January 9, 2010

Others

Similar vocabulary was used for these matters in other countries:

  • The fraternization ban on American soldiers was lifted in October 1945. From then on, black soldiers were allowed to go out with German (white) women. Some of the " Brown Babies " were taken in by black adoptive parents in the United States.

See also

literature

  • Ebba D. Drolshagen , Wehrmacht children. In search of the never-before-known father , Droemer Knaur Munich 2005; ISBN 3-426-27357-8 .
  • Ebba D. Drolshagen, Don't get away with it. The fate of women in the occupied countries who loved Wehrmacht soldiers . With a foreword by Klaus Theweleit. Verlag Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1998; ISBN 3-455-11262-5 .
  • Alain Brossat, Les tondues. Un carnaval moche . Paris 1992. (= first book published in France on the subject of "Horizontal Collaboration")
  • Christine Künzel, Gaby Temme (eds.), Perpetrators and / or victims? Women in structures of violence, LIT Verlag Münster-Hamburg-Berlin-Vienna-London-Zurich 2007; ISBN 978-3-8258-8968-5 .
  • Jean-Paul Picaper, Ludwig Norz: The children of shame. The tragic fate of German occupation children in France . Piper Munich-Zurich 2005. ISBN 3-492-04697-5
  • Fabrice Virgili, La France “virile”. Des femmes tondues à la Liberation (nouvelle édition), Payot & Rivages Paris 2004; ISBN 2-228-89857-0 .
  • Material collection Les femmes tondues at the state education server Baden-Württemberg

Documentary:

  • Isabelle Clarke, Daniel Costelle: Amour et sexe sous l'occupation. France 2011, 72 min. German television broadcast: In bed with the enemy - love and sex in war. 3sat , January 13, 2013

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Berlin recognizes the children of German soldiers. See also AFP: French Wehrmacht children welcome dual nationality
  2. ↑ Marc Bergère, Tous les milieux sociaux ont été visés , p. 56 f. in: Historia, No. 693, Paris, September 2004, pp. 56-60.
  3. ↑ The "forgotten children". ( Memento of November 30, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) According to Ebba D. Drolshagen (2005, p. 9), the number of German Wehrmacht children across Europe is between one and two million.
  4. ↑ See Verena Stössinger ( Memento from December 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ See Robert Capa: Chartres, August 1944
  6. ↑ See also Robert Jordan's mistress María, shorn by Franquists, in Hemingway's Whom the Hour Strikes .
  7. ^ Jean-Paul Picaper, Humiliées par les 'chasseurs de scalps' , p. 67, in: Historia, No. 693, Paris, September 2004, pp. 64–67.
  8. ^ Bamboo Eds. https://books.google.de/books?id=D4fgBAAAQBAJ , https://books.google.de/books?id=6tnjBAAAQBAJ
  9. ↑ page of the production company