ABSTRACT
One might expect that, adhering to conceptions of pre-1914 femininity that prioritized motherhood, adults on the home front would shield girls from violent representations of war. One might also expect that, in a society mobilized for war and subject to martial law, girls would find their lives more regulated and subject to discipline. In fact, evidence from newspapers, memoirs, journals for schoolteachers, reports by the police and by welfare officials, books and magazines for young people, and the school essays of children themselves suggests that neither of these propositions was generally true for Germany during the First World War. Most teachers, authors, parents, and leaders of youth associations encouraged girls to become engrossed in the war, and both school curriculum and youth literature to which they were exposed regularly depicted combat positively. As the lives of many young girls and some teenage girls now revolved around volunteering for the war in their leisure time, war filled their thoughts inside and outside of school, and sometimes in the violent representations gleaned from school curriculum and from literature. The commitment to the war mobilization effort might have waned over the war years, but it never disappeared, particularly in the Protestant countryside, in small towns, and in the middle-class urban world throughout Protestant and Catholic Germany.
