Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

History

Advisor

Dagmar Herzog

Committee Members

Benjamin C. Hett

Julia Sneeringer

Christina Morina

Camille Robcis

Subject Categories

Cultural History | European History | History of Gender | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Intellectual History | Women's History

Keywords

West Germany, German Democratic Republic, Motherhood, Maternalism, Memory, Ecology

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the history of (post-)Cold War Germany from the 1970s to the early 2000s through the lens of the politics of motherhood and demonstrates that both East German socialism and West German democracy were significantly shaped by questions around reproduction and the family. Asking why and how it was possible after German unification in 1990 to dismantle the comprehensive childcare system the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had provided and to take away the reproductive rights East German women had been granted under socialism, “Reproductive Nation” traces the formation and consolidation of a far-reaching cross-political (West) German consensus on motherhood that defined the 1970s through the 1990s and only began to come apart in the early 2000s when eugenically motivated concern about German birth rates and “human capital” finally led to the expansion of childcare and a growing acceptance of working motherhood. Examining how the controversies over “good” motherhood additionally served to reinvent the meanings and implications of different national pasts as well as how issues of reproduction took center stage in national conversations around “nature,” “health,” and technology, this dissertation shows that the negotiation of broader social and moral-political questions through these debates around motherhood and reproduction allowed for the assertion and imposition of both national- and gender-conservative agendas in West and later re-unified Germany but also, notably, was an important factor contributing to the disruption and eventual overthrow of a repressive state apparatus in East Germany. My analysis of discussions around motherhood and reproduction on both sides of the Iron Curtain, among medical and psychological experts from diverging political backgrounds, in party politics reaching from the Greens to the Christian Democrats, in activist ephemera from feminist movements, and in fiction and feuilleton debates and popular magazines thus upends Cold War political geographies and challenges widely held suppositions about democracy, dictatorship, and (the memory of) fascism and communism in Germany.

Download

This work is embargoed and will be available for download on Thursday, June 10, 2027

Share

COinS