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European Integration: A Concise History

adventurous examples of heroic but homely, self-sacrificing German women maintaining harmony and leading their children down the paths of culture, religion and national pride. The final chapter examines literature based on Queen Luise of Prussia, presented to the girls as a real-life paragon of all domestic and national virtues. She was portrayed as mother of the nation, defender of the German spirit against the moral degradation of France, at heart a ‘simple German wife and mother’ whose public role was merely an extension of her familial one. A woman’s contribution to national welfare was shown to be on the domestic front, to be pursued with the same passionate commitment as the boys’ military endeavours. The Luise literature provides a stark contrast to the novel with which the book begins, Gabriele Reuter’s 1895 Aus guter Familie. Here, the young female heroine, thwarted in all her attempts to gain a wider education, finally ends in a mental institution inhabited mainly by women unable or unwilling to conform to a national stereotype of womanly behaviour that had little basis in their daily realities. Jennifer Drake Askey’s book shows how the middle-class girls in Wilhelminian Germany were educated to find emotional satisfaction in a future role on which supposedly the fate of the nation as well as that of their families depended. However, as the author suggests, this education incapacitated individual young women and would fail in face of the demands of the twentieth century. Yet she underplays, as did that society itself, young females’ access to ‘unsuitable’ literature, attainable by covert purchases and loans, and she claims lack of accurate source-material to determine the effect of their restrictive education on the individuals themselves. Autobiographical works by two very different young women from this system, Ina Seidel (1970) and Vicki Baum (1987), who successfully adapted to the dramatic social and personal changes of their lives, tell the wider story. Knowledge gained from gossip with peers and servants, by direct observation of those lower classes with whom their charitable work put them into contact and of agricultural life during family holidays, helped counterbalance the individuals’ ignorance and undermine their guarded innocence. These accounts confirm that the women defined themselves primarily as wives and mothers, despite their prominent public status, but also demonstrate a resistance and resilience, common to many of their generation, that makes Gabriele Reuter’s neurotic heroine as much an exception as the saintly Queen Luise.