Artie Mead: ‘Hi everyone, welcome back to the History Buff, and today I am joined by a familiar face, a fellow tour guide, Miss Ernestina, as I call her. But real name, Tina of Tina’s Tours Berlin. Hello, welcome back.’
Tina Searle: ‘Hi Artie. Super nice to be back on the History Buff.’
Artie Mead: ‘Lovely to have you. Yeah, you’re rightful place as a recurring History Buff now. Very excited to have you here because we’re going to be talking about a topic which is a big feature of what we talk about on our tours, and I guess you could say it’s something that has become somewhat of a legend here in Germany, hasn’t it? You know because life in Berlin after the war was real—well during and immediately after the war was extremely tough and for no one more so than the women. And the images of these women is something that I think is very ingrained in the collective memory.
And those women that we’re talking about are known as the Rubble Women. This comes from the English translation of the German word Trümmerfrauen, which obviously is a very German way of naming these women, because it’s just very kind of—’
Tina Searle: ‘Literal, the Germans love a literal naming of things there. What shall we call the women who cleared the rubble? The Rubble Women.’
Artie Mead: ‘So yeah, that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Yeah, I mean, I guess, let’s just start by introducing them. Rubble Women was the name given to these women who cleared, cleaned, and sorted the rubble from the war destruction of German cities to prepare for reconstruction. I guess that’s the most basic way you could.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah, absolutely.’
Artie Mead: ‘As I said, they became a positive symbol of Germany at the time when it was totally physically and crucially morally destroyed.’
Tina Searle: ‘I think today one of the most prevailing and prevalent images in the German narrative is women clearing the rubble in the wake of the Second World War. It allows Germany to have kind of this positive image of itself after one of its dark, absolute darkest period of history. And this kind of becomes synonymous with the rebuilding and the creation of a new Germany. So Rubble Woman is most definitely one of the most famous and iconic images that you’ve got in the nation today.’
Artie Mead: ‘100%. Now there’s two kind of key elements to their story, which we’ll talk about. First of all, there’s the human element, obviously the experiences of the Trümmerfrauen, of the Rubble Women. You know, their motivations for clearing the rubble, you know, whether it was driven by necessity, they were forced to do so, or, you know, if they did it to just, you know, survive the methods and, you know, the feelings. And then the other element is the symbolic element. So, you know, how the image of the Rubble Woman has been used in German history and how it has shaped into somewhat of a myth.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah.’
Artie Mead: ‘For political purposes. And that’s something that we’ll also talk about is that a lot of historians do agree today that the contribution of the Rubble Women has been largely inflated.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah. Yeah. I think with a lot of topics in history, there’s the what actually happened and then the how’s it been used? And how has that changed the politics? The popular perception of what actually happened. Yeah, so we’re going to be talking about, yeah, this kind of individual, this human element. What did women actually contribute? What did that look like for them as individuals without trying to minimize that for a second? On the individual human scale, some of the things that these women did really, they’re incredible, significant. And then there’s how that was kind of harnessed or appropriated or inflated and used differently by the two Germanys, which is always so interesting in German history. You’ve got what did the East do with it? What did the West do with it? And what’s happened with it today?’
Artie Mead: ‘Yes, of course. Speaking of the two Germanys, that’s a perfect cue for us to dive right in and start obviously with the background history of the Rubble Women, which obviously begins at the end of the Second World War. So, I mean, It is important to remember that the clearing of rubble had been going on throughout the whole of the bombing campaigns of German cities. It’s just that in those times it wasn’t done by German civilians. It was done by prisoners of war. It was done by forced laborers. The utilization of women for clearing rubble largely came at the end of the war when Germany lay in ruins.
So massive destruction from Allied bombings all over the country. I’m sure, you know, most of you know some of the details about this, but about a quarter of the 16 million homes in Germany were completely destroyed in bombing campaigns and another quarter was severely damaged. About 40 percent of the transport facilities and half of all school buildings were unusable. And yeah, in total, more than 400 million cubic meters of rubble lay throughout Germany at the end of the war.’
Tina Searle: ‘I found a great statistic that put that in perspective. It said that if you would have piled up all of the rubble, this 400 cubic meters of rubble that lay strewn across Germany at the end of the Second World War, it would have created a 4,000 meter high mountain, which would be like the size of an alpine mountain.’
Artie Mead: ‘Wow.’
Tina Searle: ‘If you’d piled up Germany’s rubble, you’d create an alpine mountain.’
Artie Mead: ‘Wow. That is mental.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, and things like that does actually really put it into perspective. And yeah, and it’s important, but it is important to stress that also we are talking with these stats, we’re talking about the whole of Germany, so not just Berlin. You’ve gotta remember that pretty much every single German urban center lay in ruins at the end of the war. So it was a pretty nightmarish time. You had also had through Allied bombing campaigns the deaths of 650,000 German civilians, mostly obviously women and children, and yeah, it was a pretty traumatic time for more reason than one.’
Tina Searle: ‘Also, I read some interesting articles that talked about the fact that other cities that were bombed, like, for example, British cities, they could also, psychologically, the population could also turn on anger. which can actually be quite a useful coping mechanism. You know, in the study of psychology, we used to say anger is the bodyguard of sadness, because of course they were the wronged nations. They could also grab onto this, this anger. Whereas of course the Germans were guilty. And so, you know, not trying to, you know, apologize for German crimes or anything, but that’s also an additional psychological element. They’re living in rubble. There’s practically no infrastructure and they’re the guilty. Yeah, they, you know, what did they allow in the period of the Nazi regime?’
Artie Mead: ‘They weren’t going to get any sympathy from the world. They knew that. Yeah, it was a very different situation for them because they knew that they wouldn’t get any sympathy. So obviously there was an immediate need to clear the rubble to start reconstruction. Now, there was obviously a severe labor shortage because you had, you know, millions of men that were either dead.’
Tina Searle: ‘One in five, one in five German men at the end of the Second World War was dead.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah.’
Tina Searle: ‘And then, of course, so many of the other men were in prisoner of war camps. By the end of it—yeah, exactly, a lot of the men who were actually in a city like Berlin at the end, they were very young, or they were elderly, or they were there because they had been really severely injured in warfare. And yeah, so I found one statistic that actually said in October 1946, there were 7 million more women than men in Germany.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah.’
Artie Mead: ‘Exactly yeah, 7 million more available women by the 1945 population estimates. So yeah, basically, women had to essentially step up. So obviously then, you know, taking on the very physically demanding task of rubble clearance.’
Tina Searle: ‘You know, Berlin, like much of Germany, lies in rubble. The Germans trying to survive in that rubble are the guilty nation, who are effectively responsible for their own devastation. Most of the men are missing. Two thirds of Berlin’s 2.3 million population are female and over 1 million of them are homeless because of the devastation. And compounded on top of all of that, there’s the trauma and the functional after effects of the rape of Berlin. So, trigger warning, we’re not about to go into detail on this, you know, would be a podcast entirely in its own right. But I just can’t live with myself whenever I don’t address this, whenever we talk about the context of the end of the Second World War.
And this piece of history is often not talked about, often even actively suppressed. It’s dismissed to this day in much of Russia as myth. There was a mass, some almost describe it as weaponized campaign of rape against women in not only Berlin, but many areas of Soviet occupied Europe in the wake of the Second World War. People often dismiss this by saying, “Oh well, on the list of Nazi atrocities were also sexual violence and rape.” And I personally say, “I don’t think that that really makes it okay.”’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, exactly.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah, and I think it’s important to liberate, you know, the element of sexual violence and war. It’s often an unspoken about element of warfare. The female experience is often also unaddressed. That’s what we’re doing in this podcast. So we have to, of course, address the fact that these Rubble Women, who find themselves effectively largely a major force now responsible for sorting out the cities, they are also dealing with the psychological trauma, sometimes the disease, sometimes the pregnancy, sometimes the need to seek an abortion of the campaign of mass rape. Right? In the immediately post war period, mostly in the Soviet area, or zone, although not to say that there weren’t, you know, rapes—’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, it did happen in the Western sectors, but nowhere near as much.’
Tina Searle: ‘Not to this scale. Two million abortions a year were carried out in the immediately post war period, mostly in the Soviet—’
Artie Mead: ‘And remember, obviously abortion was, of course—’
Tina Searle: ‘Illegal’
Artie Mead: ‘Illegal back then, so these abortions would have been dirty backstreet abortions.’
Tina Searle: ‘And 150 to 200,000, as they called them, Russian babies were born as a result of rape, or so it’s estimated. I mean, to get accurate statistics on a mass campaign of rape at the end of a war, I don’t think will ever exist.’
Artie Mead: ‘And you’ve also got to remember all that horrible, the after effects of the—because of the shame that these women would have felt. you would have had, you know, suicides. You’d have had, yeah, these dirty backstreet abortions, all of this kind of stuff. So you’ve got to remember. Yeah, so for the women, for the German women, and in total an estimated 2 million German women throughout the whole country were raped by Soviet soldiers. So largely by Soviet soldiers. So yeah, you know, it was a very, very, very tough traumatic time for German women at the end of the war. And I think the Rubble Women go some way to showing the resolve of the German spirit, the unbreakable resolve, I suppose you could say. It really sort of fits into that.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah, absolutely. It’s certainly at least how it’s been harnessed. And I think there’s some absolute, some truth to that.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, definitely. Exactly. Okay, so I guess we’ll start with the nature of their work. I guess you guys, I mean, I guess it’s pretty self explanatory, but, you know, clearing rubble involved heavy backbreaking labor. So, you know, lifting stones, removing debris, you know, and also crucially sorting unusable materials. Because obviously in the rebuilding of Berlin, they wanted to save as much money as possible in rebuilding the city. So they needed to make sure that they saved all of the salvageable—’
Tina Searle: ‘Materials.’
Artie Mead: ‘Materials. So these women worked with basic tools or bare hands. Now, the average work day of a Trümmerfrau was nine hours long with a 20 to 30 minute lunch break.’
Tina Searle: ‘So one of the big motivators for women, you know, there’s been this historical image that they worked voluntarily, they’re just doing what has to be done. Some women, absolutely, they are just clearing way from their area of the city to the nearest water pump. They are clearing out rubble from their own home, and they are sorting out the bricks and the pipes that could be used to rebuild it. For the most part, women were gathered together and put to work, particularly in the Soviet sector, not so much in the other sectors. And at a certain point they could volunteer, but they’re still paid. Right?
They’re getting their 70 pfennig salary, which was very small. But one of the major perks of being an actual organized Rubble Women was that you go into the second highest ration category in post war Berlin. And that was literally a lifesaver, So a housewife’s ration category, meaning you’re not an active person, you’re not actively laboring, it was somewhere between 900 and 1200 calories per day. Right? So this is grossly inadequate for a human being to sustain themselves.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, for women, it’s actually about, it’s meant to be 2,000 a day. I think it is.’
Tina Searle: ‘Something like that. Yeah. And meanwhile, if you became a Trümmerfrau, you’re looking more like 2,000 to 2,400 calories a day, which is a massive, a massive difference. And that literally was how many women, by becoming Rubble Women, they actually helped sustain their entire family circle.’
Artie Mead: ‘Right, okay. Becoming Trümmerfrauen, it really, you know, was the difference between eating properly or just getting by, I suppose. Something that I found was that many did actually become Rubble Women voluntarily, but actually, also people, women did actually become, especially if they lived in the Soviet sector, they would actually often be forced to become Rubble Women. So, yeah, obviously a considerable number of these women were from the Soviet zone, but men and machinery also played a significant role in the clearing efforts across the whole nation.
So, you know, but it’s just obviously we are focusing on the Rubble Women and their legacy. Okay, so that’s why, you know, we’re doing this episode now. They were actually listed as builders. Rubble workers or workers for clearance. The way that they actually did the brick salvaging process, quite interesting, so they demolished sections of the walls to separate undamaged bricks They passed the bricks hand to hand in a chain to the roadside. Now these are the famous images that I think quite a lot of people would have seen. They placed these bricks on wooden trestles or solid surfaces, removed mortar residue with brick layers or plastering hammers, and stacked the bricks as per specific guidelines.
So usually, 16 pieces per area, so 4 by 4, 12 layers on top of each other, and a central pile of 8 pieces, creating stacks of 200 bricks. So then that meant that these bricks were then ready to just be picked up and taken off for rebuilding. Yeah, they reused half bricks, beams, steel girders, stoves, wash basins, toilet bowls, pipes, and other items. So when they had these piles of rubble, the stuff that wasn’t able to be reused, these were obviously then put in skips or in—’
Tina Searle: ‘Wagons, I think. They erected wagons on rails on the streets.’
Artie Mead: ‘Exactly, and they actually constructed specific railways to be able to take it from the city to—and they were called rubble railways, and they would then take the these piles of rubble out to the suburbs, and in berlin there is a very famous hill of rubble called Teufelsberg or Devil’s Mountain. And it’s famous because on top of it, you have an abandoned listening station, an abandoned U.S. listening station from the Cold War. It’s really cool. It’s now an artist colony. Yeah. And the hill that it’s on top of is one of those rubble mountains and—’
Tina Searle: ‘I think it’s quite over a dozen of those in Berlin.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. No, we do. I actually didn’t know that, but this is obviously, Teufelsberg is obviously the most famous, but yeah, they have multiple ones. Yeah, all around the kind of in the sort of suburb areas.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah. And often where—so the usable rubble, right, they’re piling into these wagons, it’s being pulled either by humans or by horses out to places where it can be useful. Or sometimes Germans are actually taking the useful bits for their own homes. I found a story about a young woman who in 1947, her mother finally found a builder who said, “I can rebuild your house, but you need to bring 700 of your own bricks.” And they were on the third floor, so they needed the kind of bricks with a hollow—they were hollow in the middle, of course, the kind of bricks that shattered the most easily during the bombing in the battle.
And so, this girl and her sisters, they spent weeks going through the piles of rubble, usable, and unusable piles until they found the 700 bricks of which Berlin could be rebuilt. So usable bits, you know, were allocated to rebuilding. But what was considered non-usable or didn’t really know what to do with it, was often piled up in these, what now has become the hills of Berlin, and often they dumped this kind of considered unusable rubble at sites that would just—that had been built by the Nazis and would just be too big to get rid of. Famously two out of the three sets of flak towers, so flak anti aircraft fire, and the Nazis built three of those twin flak towers in Berlin.
The British managed to get rid of those, which was just a massive undertaking of theirs and their sector. But the others, the flak towers in Friedrichshain in the Soviet sector, and in Humboldthain, they were just too big to get rid of. Right, these flak towers were designed for 15,000 people to take refuge inside. You know, we’re talking in meters and meters of concrete on ceilings, on walls, built to design the dropping of bombs. And so instead of destroying these monstrous chunk of concrete at the end of the war, often they would just pile unusable rubble from the chaos of the city into these.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah.’
Tina Searle: ‘And so things like, you know, in Volkspark Friedrichshain or the People’s Park of Friedrichshain, there’s a hill. It’s actually piled up rubble on top of what used to be a flak tower and grass has just grown over it.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah.’
Tina Searle: ‘And now it’s one of the only hills in Berlin.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. No, and I believe Teufelsberg is built on top of a technical college. Yeah, which was basically indestructible. They couldn’t like destroy it. And so, yeah, they were like, “If we can’t destroy it, let’s just dump all the rubble on it.”’
Tina Searle: ‘Pile stuff on it.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. Exactly. I love that.’
Tina Searle: ‘And that’s how Berlin got hills. Other than that, it’s a very flat city, great for bike riding.’
Artie Mead: ‘That is actually so true. I didn’t think about it like that. Yeah, so if you see any hills in Berlin, chances are it’s probably made out of rubble.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah, literally.’
Artie Mead: ‘So, yeah, that was the story of what happened to the unusable rubble. And so the story of the rubble.’
Tina Searle: ‘What a Rubble Woman’s day looked like was very different based on when she’s being allocated to work at what time. For example, normally there’s this process we’re talking about whereby they’re clearing out the rubble from bomb damage, they’re sorting it, they’re cleaning the bricks, they’re stacking them, they’re sending them off, but sometimes that look different. Like for example, right in the wake of the Second World War, I found accounts from many women, who were, for example, involved in sorting live ammunition. Berlin’s Tiergarten Park, for example, if you visited Berlin, you know, the big beautiful park right behind the Brandenburg Gate on the edge of Parliament, that was full of basically stuff that soldiers had dumped at the end of the war in the hope that they wouldn’t be recognized by the Red Army as soldiers.
And so, I found an account about a woman, who when she was 18 years old, was told, “Okay, everyone between the age of 15 and 50 has to present for work.” She presented for work and Soviet female officer said, “You’re allocated to the Tiergarten Park.” And when she arrived, she said she worked with about 40 women that day or that period, sorry. And they had to go through this piles of stuff in the Tiergarten Park. Any live ammunition they were told to throw in a little lake there. Yeah, and a couple of women unfortunately did actually die when something they were throwing in the lake exploded on them. And anything that wasn’t dangerous, they were told to pile up in a bomb crater and they were told that later some other band of women would come and sort through it, and figure out what in that crater was usable.’
Artie Mead: ‘Wow.’
Tina Searle: ‘And so that’s kind of one of the stories of the Rubble Women, which is very different to that image of kind of almost chain gangs of women passing stones, cleaning stones that becomes more famous just that little bit later in the post war story.’
Artie Mead: ‘Right. Yeah. That’s super interesting. I didn’t know that. Also, another interesting story about it is that actually the Rubble Women. actually influenced fashion in Berlin. So after the war, Berlin very quickly became the fashion capital of Germany. Women sold personal belongings for food during the war, exchanging items like stockings and carpets for essentials like potatoes, which obviously towards the end of the war became increasingly hard to get. With the arrival of the Allied soldiers, and rubble clearing, women found obviously then more objects to sell because they were going through these, you know, destroyed buildings clearing the rubble.
So, you know, when they cleared a certain amount of rubble, they’d obviously find some objects in the house. So they would sell these objects, but also they found rags that were salvaged from the debris. And old shop owners used sewing machines to turn these rags into dresses, called Lumpenkleider, or rag dresses. So, yeah, I don’t know, it’s just a testament to the resourcefulness of the human spirit. And so, you know, and it really gives this kind of sense of normalcy and hope that they would, they were trying to get back to kind of pre war life as soon as possible.’
Tina Searle: ‘So I actually found, what looks like quite a beautiful book, unfortunately, as far as I could see, only published in German called, “Darf man jetzt von Mode sprechen?” Or, “Are we allowed to talk about fashion yet?”, which is about the fashion and the textile industry and also this resourcefulness in post war Germany. And in there, there was this amazing story about a little girl in post war Germany, where her mom manages to sew for her from whatever fabric they could find, one good dress. So that in the following years, if ever anything important was happening at school, she had one good dress, and she called it her little red riding hood dress because the colors were red, black, and white.
Where do we think mom got fabric of red, black, and white in the wake of the Second World War? It was an old Nazi flag. She found an old Nazi flag in the roof. She wasn’t allowed to have it, so she turned it into a dress for her daughter.’
Artie Mead: ‘Kleine is still quite resourceful, though.’
Tina Searle: ‘I mean, the best use of a Nazi flag ever existed. There’s nothing else good to do with one. Yeah, and I think if we’re talking fashion, you know, I had the most incredible stories about women taking on old soldiers’ uniforms and altering them into overalls so they had appropriate clothing to wear while laboring. If we’re talking fashion and post war Berlin, we also have to address fraternization.’
Artie Mead: ‘Because obviously a lot of the time it, they would, women would want to look nice for the allied soldiers because obviously, you know, getting intimate with the occupying soldiers was a way for protection. Protection, food, just security, basically.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah, there were a lot of Germans really looked down on women for this. I found the most fascinating article that actually said that, for many Germans, that fraternization, what was seen as promiscuity, was actually seen as a break of morality that started after the Nazi time. Not in the Nazi time, after.’
Artie Mead: ‘After, yeah.’
Tina Searle: ‘And for many Germans trying to romanticize the Nazi, the good old days, that fraternization was actually seen as a loss of morality starting at the end of the Nazi period, which is a very scary article. So for many Germans, they looked down terribly on those women who fraternized with the occupation soldiers. But for other women, it was an element of survival.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yes, exactly.’
Tina Searle: ‘The food—the mark became so useless right in the chaos of the post war period. The, of course, mark that had the swastika on it couldn’t keep circulating, so the allied armies quickly issued occupation marks, which also quickly were just totally valueless. There’s this thriving black market economy. American cigarettes could often buy you more food to put on your family table than the actual currency could. And that was only really relieved with the currency reform of 1948 when actual kind of stable mark was introduced. And so, for a lot of women, it was, for some, it was probably a choice of actual pleasure or desire, but for many women, it was just a smart survival choice.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yes.’
Tina Searle: ‘You fraternize with an occupation soldier, you get access to their rations and their cigarettes, which you can trade.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yes.’
Tina Searle: ‘And so looking nice for some women was not just about this curious desire that we seem to have inside of us, even in chaos, to want to look nice, it was for many women also a survival task.’
Artie Mead: ‘Definitely. And I have something that—because also, a lot of these women would have been left without husbands, you know, with young children to care for so that, you know, they had also dependents to also think about as well. So that’s something that people have to remember.’
Tina Searle: ‘Oh yeah. Talking about the nature of their work. That’s something I’d also like to address. You know, today, although we paint, these women in German history painted as heroes who selflessly totally cleaned the streets of Germany, and it’s like, well, you know, a lot of them were doing because they kind of had to, or they got rations, or they got paid, or it was necessity. It’s like, “If I don’t clear the way to water, I can’t get water.” And many of the women whose interviews I found, they said, like, “This idea of us as heroes only developed much later. We were just doing what we had to do.” But, that being said, often when I read the accounts of what these women were achieving, I, by my today, naive, very privileged standards, I feel like, “Man, that’s, I call that pretty heroic.”’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah.’
Tina Searle: ‘You know, they’re working as a Rubble Woman, effective, woman effectively all day. That’s, you know, they often, they talked about their hands being stripped back because they’re working with inadequate tools, if any at all. And then in addition to that, they’re having to stand in line to actually trade these ration coupons into rations. Sometimes that’s hours and hours of queuing a day because there was so little available. There was so much black market economy that often what you were meant to get with your ration coupon cards, you couldn’t. So then they’re also often standing or walking hours a day to go to the black market to trade for the things that they couldn’t get with their ration cards to feed their families.
And then they, they also talked about the hours and hours of constantly searching for anything you could burn as firewood. One account of a woman I found who cleared out ammunition in Tiergarten Park, she said they realized that the hand grenades had wooden handles. And if you broke off the wooden handle of the hand grenade, you could cook at home, you could cook. Right, you could use that to light your stove. So they’re working as Rubble Women. They’re queuing for rations, they’re queuing for the black market, they’re gathering wood so they can attempt to cook at home with whatever totally menial access to food they have, and they’re doing all of that normal caring for children that comes with being a mother.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah.’
Tina Searle: ‘That is, that is genuinely incredible.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, it sounds like pretty, it does sound like, you know, going above and beyond by any stretch of the imagination.’
Tina Searle: ‘Well for someone, certainly for someone me who cross fingers touch wood, I’ve been privileged enough never to have to live in this kind of profound survival environment. That is for me, that’s a massive amount of work.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yes, of course.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah, and even if we’ve kind of over history inflated how much of German cities were cleared by this woman, these women, your one accounts estimate I read said that, “You’d need 42,000 women working for 25 years to have cleared all the rubble of Germany.” You know, the reality is that although the image was they worked alone, they didn’t, they had machinery. They sometimes had companies, they sometimes had men, and they were mostly only in the Soviet zone. Regardless, if you look at an individual woman and what she was doing just for the survival of herself and her family at that time, it was incredible.’
Artie Mead: ‘And all of the extra trauma that women had to suffer. You know, so, because I think it, you know, they did suffer, you know, other traumas, you know, like the mass rape and then having to look out for their families and all of this kind of stuff. So, yeah, no, I definitely think that you’re right. Like they were definitely very resilient. And as I mentioned earlier, these Rubble Women, for me, they represent the resilience of the human spirit and the unbreakable resolve of the human spirit. Just a bit of background, so if you don’t know about it, go and watch the, or listen to the series about the Berlin Wall because you might be able to find out about this in more detail, but after the war, Germany was divided.
So, which would eventually become West Germany or capitalist democratic Germany and East Germany or socialist Germany. West Germany being the Federal Republic of Germany, East Germany being the German Democratic Republic. So, but first of all, West Germany was the British American and French sectors in the West. And the GDR, East Germany was the Soviet sector. Now Berlin itself was also divided into four sectors between these four victorious powers. So Soviet Union, United States, Britain and France. The way you’ve got to think about this is what these two ideologies and systems wanted to get out of—’
Tina Searle: ‘This image.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, this image. Because, you know, and it was both sides. It wasn’t just one side. But I will say that from the research that I’ve done in the east, so in the Soviet sector, which would become the GDR, they were more, I think, celebrated.’
Tina Searle: ‘Absolutely. Yeah, and that fit with the ideology. You know, East Germany was claiming that they were on the route to realizing Marxist communism, a society where we’re all equal, and equality in the Marxist ideology should lead not only to equality around, you know, wealth and access to resources and no class divide, it should also lead to equality between the genders. And so East Germany’s story was that they’d created a thriving socialist state. And so, of course, for that to be true, there had to be gender equality. So East Germany was super proud of the fact that women worked.
It also had comparatively really liberal, progressive, as I would call them today, conditions around, not originally, it came later, but divorce, abortion, childcare. And the truth was that there was not gender equality. There was a serious glass ceiling for women. You know, women didn’t make it into the center of the government, but women worked. And I recently finished a fascinating book, can recommend, “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.” You know, in many ways, East Germany was much further on the road of women’s liberation than West Germany. Absolutely.’
Artie Mead: ‘Definitely. I mean, the West was very conservative. The church actually had a lot of influence in the state in the West. And well, it had a lot of influence over the conservative party, which dominated post war politics in West Germany. They were celebrated because, yeah, as I said, they were embodying the values of, yeah, hard work, collective effort. And it’s quite funny, the difference is illustrated in this story of a visit to Berlin, to East Berlin, by an SPD politician from the Western state of Bavaria. So someone called Lisa Albrecht, so she visited the East in 1948, and she was shocked at the sight of Rubble Women. And I think that sort of encapsulates the divide, because obviously in the West, where it was a lot more conservative, women were meant to be stay at home wives. And so this image of, you know, liberated woman doing jobs that men do, you know—’
Tina Searle: ‘It can seen as very unwomanly to work at all, let alone to do that kind of physical—’
Artie Mead: ‘Definitely. So yeah, in West Germany, you know, they were, they’re, I think the Rubble Women in West Germany were remembered as part of a sort of broader narrative of recovery and the economic miracle, I suppose. You could argue they were integral in the economic miracle, because obviously in order to, you know, to bring that about, first of all, they had to clear everything up and make it so that they could have this miracle in the 50s and in the West. But yeah, I think, to be honest, they were—the difference was, is that you had, in the East, it became a way of, again, just promoting socialism, I suppose you could say.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah, in the East, they were seen as the trailblazers of women working. So the trailblazers of achieving gender equality. A trailblazer of a core element of socialism. The West, I found this really fascinating article, and then I went right down the rabbit hole of the use of Rubble Women in West Germany, and it’s fascinating. In the early fifties, there was a bit of commemoration, right? We saw memorials erected all over West Germany. Like there’s one in the Hasenheider park of Berlin erected in 55. And then some women in the early 50s, and men, so women and men were awarded medals, the Order of Merit for their contribution cleaning rubble.
But then after that, it basically drops out of public image because, like we discussed, it doesn’t fit with West Germany’s perspective on women. Women in West Germany were meant to be, “Kinder, Küche und Kirche.” So children, kitchen, and church. That was the role for women. Up until 1955, it was enshrined in the West German constitution that a woman had to have her husband’s permission to work. And a cause of that remained until 1977. So this idea of working women did not fit with the West German narrative, which was incredibly conservative from my current perspective.’
Artie Mead: ‘I think it’s objectively pretty conservative.’
Tina Searle: ‘Objectively conservative. I think I can say that. And there was, however, this concept of the Rubble Women as being a part of this, “Phoenix rising from the ashes, the West German economic miracle.” They liked the story as much as it was a part of that backstory for West Germany. “This resilience, the determination of West Germany.” But it was kind of more harnessed as a nationwide story.’
Artie Mead: ‘To deal with the guilt. To deal with the guilt.’
Tina Searle: ‘Exactly. And also to help paint, “Oh, Germans were victims too.” I actually read that there was some alarming use of the Rubble Woman image by continuing fascists. It allowed them to paint, you know, to focus on the victimhood of Germans.’
Artie Mead: ‘Right.’
Tina Searle: ‘And then there was this really fascinating rediscovery of the Rubble Women in the West and the 80s for two major reasons. One is feminism, right? The feminist movements coming up, you know, women are getting committed to look at women’s history and find out what hasn’t been talked about. And something I didn’t expect to have put it back on the table, a reformed pension by Co’s government. So basically in the eighties, Co suggests this new pension concept, which will mean that a mother’s first year of looking—the first year of a baby’s life will be counted toward the mother’s pension. But there was going to be a clause on it, which excluded women born before 1921. And that’s when in West Germany, there’s this massive kind of rediscovery or re digging out of the rubble, shall we say, of the image of the Rubble Women, so that women born before 1921 could say, “Hey, look what we’ve done for this nation. Look at our contribution.”’
Artie Mead: ‘Right.’
Tina Searle: ‘And so that’s when there’s this kind of rediscovery of the Rubble Women as a female story in West Germany.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, and that’s when they start to get all of these memorials, right?’
Tina Searle: ‘I think actually a lot of the memorials are from the fifties.’
Artie Mead: ‘Oh, really? Okay.’
Tina Searle: ‘I thought there’s this brief kind of period of memory in the fifties, this, “We are rising from the ashes. Look at our determination.” And also this focusing on victimhood of the West Germany, and then there’s kind of like, “It doesn’t fit with our image of women. Shhh.”’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’
Tina Searle: ‘And actually, I did also read that it was only really for those kind of 30 years discussed in West Germany in the context of pitying East Germany, which fits interestingly with that account you found of a West German politician visiting the Soviet zone. This, “Oh, yeah, we’ve had the economic miracle, so our women can be where they belong in the kitchen with the children at the church, but, oh, East Germany, their economy is failing so terribly. You know, women still have to clear rubble.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’
Tina Searle: ‘It was only really discussed to demonize the economy of East Germany.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah.’
Tina Searle: ‘And then there’s this rediscovery of the image in the eighties because it comes useful for, you know, this pension, right, for older women.’
Artie Mead: ‘Okay. So yeah, there’s just a lull, basically, a lull in the memory. So, yeah, and as we said there are memorials to the Rubble Women all over Germany. So the commemoration of, there was a new, yes, as you said, wave of this kind of commemoration of the Rubble Women, which was actually initiated after a former Rubble Woman actually hanged herself in 1986 due to financial struggles. And that’s linked to the 9th of July, which is a day of remembrance for the women who cleared rubble. Something interesting, another interesting fact, is actually the famous Karl-Marx-Allee in East Berlin, originally called Stalinallee, actually had flats specifically given to Trümmerfrauen.
So women who worked in East Berlin clearing rubble were actually given flats in these very nice apartment blocks, Stalinist apartment blocks, which did eventually become flats for the kind of elite, the Communist Party elite. But yeah, they, at least at first, the Rubble Women did have some, you know, priority, which is quite nice to know. Now there is actually a book that was written by a historian called Leonie Treber, and it’s actually titled, “The Myth of the Rubble Women.” And I guess, to be honest, you know, the Rubble Women weren’t, it’s not that they didn’t exist, they did exist, you know, there is literally photographic evidence of them. They did exist. It’s just more, I think, I guess, the nuances. It’s talking about the nuances, I suppose you could say, and to the extent of which the memory of and the way they are remembered has been kind of inflated.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah.’
Artie Mead: ‘So for example, in Berlin, 60,000 women were mobilized for clearing rubble, which was about 5 percent of the female population. Now people viewed clearing, like I alluded to earlier, people viewed clearing rubble as a punishment because during the war, like, yeah, like I said, it had been the prisoners of war force laborers, you know, concentration camp inmates, who had been forced to clear the rubble after Allied air raids on German cities. But obviously after the end of the war, that all changed, and Nazi party members and workers.’
Tina Searle: ‘It was a punishment, literally, for people found by the occupation armies who go, “Oh, you’ve got quite the Nazi past,” or sometimes, “You were a Nazi party member.” They’re forced, originally, before they kind of coordinate, “Hey, all people between this age and that age are unemployed, have to have to do this work, or people can volunteer.” Before there’s that kind of coordinated effort. It’s literally a punishment labor of Nazis.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. Exactly. And like we said, it was usually voluntary in the West, but they were actually forced to in the Soviet zone. And Treber says that the image of the cheerful Rubble Woman going to work to help to rebuild the country is ingrained in the collective memory in Germany. And as we have already said, it’s, I think, partly to kind of help with the shame and the guilt of what the Nazis did. And because, yeah, and also, as Miss Ernestina said, the myth portrays them as the sole saviors of the devastated city.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah, kind of the narrative is very much, “They cleared the whole thing.” Right? All of Germany was cleared by rubble. That’s very much the narrative. And really before this book by Leonid Treber came out, I think, had you’ve say googled, “Rubble Women,” you’d have just found these incredible stories. You’d have found, you know, women talking about working with their hands and clearing live ammunition. And this woman who said, “It took us seven months to clear just one building to the point where it could be reconstructed.”
And yeah, this kind of heroic painting. I found in German, also only unfortunately on YouTube, Trümmerfrauen Erzählen, or “Rubble Women explain.” And quotes like [German], like, “We did it with pleasure,” saying because, you know, with all the work, we could see our city’s improving and improving. This very altruistic, selfless painting, and also certainly the message, these women did it all. And I think Treber’s book, I mean, her thesis is, that actually, statistically, if you look at the clearing of rubble across Germany, their contribution was small. The majority of it was cleared by machinery and men.
So their contribution in terms of actual clearing has been inflated beyond reality. Her other point is that this idea that they were selflessly doing with pleasure what had to be done, she’s saying, “Actually it was mostly seen by people as shameful punishment work.” And she revealed that a lot of the most famous photos we have of these women working together were actually staged to try and get more people to sign up for the labor. Because there was such a negative connotation with rubble clearing, because like you said, it was performed by people the Nazis called, you know, undesirables or degenerates throughout the war, then performed as a punishment after the war, and it’s hard work, a lot of people didn’t want to sign up.
And so there was actually the staging by the Soviet occupation force of these well dressed made up women sorting rubble, right? A lot of the images that we—when I imagine Rubble Women, I discovered that most of the images that I have in my mind were staged. And so that’s really what Leonid Treber is getting at, that we’ve kind of inflated this thing out of reality. But normally, I’m a very pro, it’s super important to remember history as it was, and to be very careful we don’t twist it too much to any purpose. But I kind of feel like women are so underrepresented normally in history that like, you know, maybe a little bit of inflation in the interest of women being remembered isn’t so bad.’
Artie Mead: ‘Well, and that’s why I want to start this series about women in history. But I do think, no, no, no, and I think that it does, it was inflated, definitely, but that doesn’t negate the contribution that these women did give.’
Tina Searle: ‘That’s exactly it. Yeah, it doesn’t negate that individual woman really did this. And also, I think probably when historians look at how many were actually registered to clear rubble, that of course, I doubt that that speaks to those individual women who literally cleared out their house and helped their neighbor clear out his house and cleared the path to the nearest water pump. Yeah.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yes, exactly. So you have all of these sort of smaller contributions, which are probably not like registered. And you probably also even have Rubber Women who weren’t registered as well. So, you know, and it was also, I think, used, the idea of the Rubble Woman was used to foster a sense of unity and sort of national identity during the Cold War. And that’s obviously when you had this kind of complex interplay between the different images and both Germanys come about. But yeah, super interesting.’
Tina Searle: ‘I do have one more thing to add. I actually found an account of a journalist who went to gymnastics with some surviving Rubble Women. Just after a newspaper report started to hit about this, the myth of the Rubble Women book, and a now very, very old lady who had herself been a Rubble Woman as a teenager in Berlin, she actually said it was, “Dangerous work and that historian has no clue.” And so I think, exactly like you were saying, Artie, just because the image of—the level of these women’s contribution to the nationwide clearing was inflated. And just because their image was harnessed in various political ways, doesn’t negate the contribution of the individual women and what they actually achieved at that time.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, exactly. And that’s something that you’ve always gotta remember, you know, and because, you know, they had been through so much. And yeah. You know, I’ve said multiple times already, but it’s just such a testament to the unbreakable resolve of the human spirit, you know? So yeah, the story of the Rubble Woman is, it’s inspiring, but it’s also complex. Like I’ve said already multiple times, it just reflects the resilience of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, you know.’
Tina Searle: ‘Yeah, and also the incredible moments in history where women have stood into roles that at the time were considered not for them.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yes.’
Tina Searle: ‘And they were often really considered not capable of fulfilling this roles, these roles. And here we’re seeing a time where women absolutely proved that they were capable of doing labor, of making decisions, of supporting survival of themselves and other human beings, which at the time was very much outside of the gender roles that were kind of available to them or limiting what people thought of their capabilities.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yes, definitely. I think that’s really important to understand as well. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s sort of everything. That was super interesting, Miss Ernestina. Thank you so much for joining me.’
Tina Searle: ‘Pleasure.’
Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, and we’ll be back with, we will be back with more episodes of women in history. I haven’t thought about the name of that series yet, but I will think of it before I release this episode. And, yeah, I think I would also quite like to go and make videos of places named after women here in Berlin. So that’ll be a fun little project for us to do. So got lots of interesting content about women in history coming up for you guys. And I can’t think of a better person to do it with than you, Miss Ernestina. So thank you so much.’
Tina Searle: ‘Thanks, Artie. Pleasure to be here.’
Artie Mead: ‘Lovely to have you. And yeah, thanks for listening, guys. And yeah, see you next time. Bye.’
Tina Searle: ‘Bye.’