Ina Merkel

This is somewhere between a light-hearted picture-book and a serious academic study, that "somewhere" being probably about nine-tenths of the way across to the academic side. Merkel looks at how the representation of women (and men) in East German illustrated magazines up to 1960 relates to the realities of women's lives, and to the ideals of the socialist state.

We're always hearing about how the emancipation of women was one of the few really positive things about life in the DDR: one of the first things the Russian military government did in 1945 was to bring in equal pay legislation, soon followed by reforms to family law, and pictures of women in the workplace (and happy children in the workplace crèche) belong to the standard public image of the workers' and peasants' state, right up to the end.

How much of that was real, and how much propaganda? Women's equality was part of the ideological basis of the new state, but there was also a desperate need to use women's productive capacity: in December 1945, women of working age outnumbered men by about two to one as a result of wartime casualties and displacements, and in the following years there was a further heavy loss of professionals and skilled workers to emigration. So there was a labour shortage, and a large pool of single women who had to rely on paid employment to support themselves.

The classic image of those early years is of the "Trümmerfrauen", the women clearing the rubble from the bomb-damaged cities by hand so that reconstruction could start. Merkel shows us some of these inspirational press photos of teams of women bundled up in shapeless clothes and headscarves, mostly seen from behind, and dwarfed by the vast areas of rubble they are working on, and she invites us to compare them with unpublished photos from the same period by the art-photographer Karl Heinz Mai, where the women — many of them in shorts and sleeveless tops — fill the frame and look challengingly right into the camera, often grinning as though they've just been sharing a dirty joke with the photographer. Same rubble, but a different story altogether. Mai's women are self-confident individuals, proud of what they are doing; the newspaper women are the sad residue of a defeated nation getting on with the job of survival.

There are other kinds of mixed messages as we go on: women may be needed in the workplace, but, just like their sisters in the West a couple of decades later, they find that they aren't needed anything like as much when it comes to competing for scarce training places for skilled work, promotion, or the horrifying thought that a woman might end up giving orders to men. Pictures of mature women doing skilled jobs in "male" roles fade out after the early fifties, and even when we do get to see them the pictures are often staged to show them in appropriately motherly settings: a woman described as the only female master-founder in Berlin is photographed in front of flowery wallpaper doing her knitting; a woman plumber is dressed in a pinny that makes her look like a housewife who's borrowed a spanner to stem the flood until a real man arrives to fix it.

Even with pretty, young women at work, there seems to be a need to assert their femininity in a way that never happens with representations of men at work; an "iron maiden" who spends the working day clearing munitions from a canal bed has to be shown taking off her diving helmet and applying lipstick. Other pictures are qualified by captions that tell us all about the subject's children, or her passion for ballroom dancing or making her own clothes.

As is also obvious from the books of women like Irmtraud Morgner and Christa Wolf, the drive to get women into work didn't come with much real lessening of domestic workloads, except for the gradual expansion of free childcare. There continued to be something comical about men trying to do household chores (except manly things like mowing the lawn, shovelling coal, fetching crates of beer), and labour-saving appliances were always much more visible in advertisements than they were in the shops.

Simone Tippach's essay deals with the development of advertising during the same period. Being good at advertising was not highly-valued in the DDR, or indeed very necessary, since most manufacturers and retailers had monopolies. Some companies were still happily using artwork developed in the thirties right up to 1960. But there was often also the same kind of confusion of values: the woman on the drill-press on the front cover is advertising ... antiseptic soap! "Trotz fast männlicher Entschlußkraft bewahrt sie stets ihren fraulichen Reiz" (Despite almost masculine decisiveness, she still keeps her feminine charm).

Fun, and some interesting background.… (mehr)