GIs and Fräuleins Essay

Instructions

The essay will be a four-page/1000-word paper on Maria Hoehn’s book about relations between West Germans and Americans after World War II. Analyze some aspect of the text, using evidence from the book. Please use Chicago Manual of Style footnotes for citing quotes or references from the text; there’s no need to use outside sources.

First mention always give full cite of the source: Maria Hoehn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 35-38.

Subsequent mentions use short form: Hoehn, GIs and Fräuleins, 35-38.

Here are some possible topics:
1. Discuss the many things America symbolized to West Germans in the 1950s. How did the encounter with Americans change German society in the post-Nazi years? How did contacts between individual Americans and Germans play a role in this?
2. What were the various implications of the American presence for local German women? Consider economic opportunities, new ways of socializing, sex, and other lifestyle changes. As in Question 1, discuss how these new contacts changed German women.
3. Race was a hot-button issue in this context, as this was the first time most Germans had contact with people of African descent. How did Germans perceive Black GIs? How did the encounter with African Americans change local Germans? How did it shape Germans’ ideas about racism and democracy? What were the gender and sexual dynamics of this? How did anti-Semitism relate to all this?
4. West Germany was allowed to remilitarize in 1955 under the auspices of the NATO alliance. What do we learn from Hoehn’s book about the place of the military in post-Nazi Germany? How did West Germans view the US Army as a force in their country, and how did this change over time? How did German ideas about the military and militarism in general evolve in this period?