ABSTRACT
With the beginning of the First World War, the wide panorama of German popular magazines was attuned almost immediately to the new state of war in the country. By modifying contents and reporting style accordingly, authors and editors acknowledged the war situation as an all-encompassing one, reaching out to their readerships and reminding them that they formed a significant part of this new society at war. This essay will look at two German girls’ periodicals—the popular, widely circulated magazine Das Kränzchen, published for a middle-class to upper-middle-class readership, and the Mädchenpost, aimed at a slightly lower-middle-class audience—to find out how the war was presented to their young female readers throughout the four years that it lasted, and retrospectively during the first years of the Weimar Republic. How did this medium communicate the outbreak of war and treat the difficulties and hardships of civilian experience, in this case that of young women? And how did they represent the horrors that soldiers had to endure at the front? How was the enmity between Germany and the countries of the Entente, former popular travel destinations, handled and explained? Apart from the magazines’ approaches, the essay will also try to trace readers’ voices and reactions to the coverage by looking at the communication pages published in the magazines. This is one of the few sources available today to illustrate that young girls used their everyday reading matter as a means to belong to a certain community in wartime, a kind of informal sisterhood that supported and helped them through a very difficult time.
