ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how marriage behaviour and gender relations in Germany changed after the end of the First World War. Specifically, the question is to what extent the war-related demographic changes and territorial restructurings from 1919 onwards had an impact on the emergence of binational and intercultural couple relationships and marriages. Various in-depth studies make it possible to approach the topic at the institutional and social levels. In addition to the administrative-bureaucratic scepticism, which intensified not least due to demographic developments, the first half of this chapter investigates the increasing charge of registry office discourses with eugenic-racist ideas. Furthermore, by way of example, the impact of the presence of Russian prisoners of war on German soil is examined. The second part of the chapter analyzes contemporary statistical recordings of intercultural marriages that occurred in the early twentieth century. By doing so, we not only get an idea of change and continuity, but we are also able to reveal practices in statistical knowledge production and techniques with which the local partner market was observed by the administrative authorities.
