GIs and Germans: Culture, gender, and foreign relations, 1945-1949

This dissertation analyzes the reciprocal relationship between culture, gender, and politics during the American occupation of Germany. It argues that personal interactions between American soldiers and German civilians transformed the dynamic of the occupation and created an environment conducive to political change. These informal contacts revealed a peculiar gender bias. GIs primarily interacted with young German women. As a result of the gendered nature of these contacts, American soldiers developed a feminized, victimized image of Germany much unlike the aggressive, militaristic, and masculine image of Nazi Germany. The transformation of these images influenced the change in American policies toward Germany from punitive to cooperative measures.;From the beginning of the occupation, the troops' personal experiences conflicted with the punitive principles of the military government. American soldiers violated the fraternization ban with impunity, forcing occupation officials to abandon the directive in October 1945. The nature of these contacts changed American views of their mission in Germany. They cast themselves increasingly in the roles of protectors and providers of a weak, victimized Germany. For their part, Germans gradually accepted their dependence on the United States, yet expected economic rewards in return for their adoption of American democracy. The Berlin airlift in 1948-49 gave expression to these differing interpretations. In the resistance of West Berliners to the Soviets, Americans presumed the success of their benevolent program of political reeducation. In the U.S. commitment to the survival of West Berlin, Germans saw a re-establishment of social and economic stability.;The rapid improvement of American-German relations after World War II emerged from a peculiar mixture of cultural affinity and subjective interpretations of cultural texts on both sides of the encounter. The cold war accelerated the process of rapprochement but was not its primary agent. After the war Americans and Germans created a sphere of cultural exchange in which they discovered their similarities and negotiated their differences. The changes in attitudes that these cross-cultural interactions produced laid the foundations for the transformation of American occupation policies in Germany.