Gender, Class and Representations of Grief in First World War Germany

Representations of grieving women are an iconic visual legacy of the First World War, resulting from the mass experience of loss that created ‘communities of mourning across belligerent countries. Drawing on a range of wartime letters, diaries and paintings this paper examines the values that were associated with certain customs of bereavement and argues that the manner in which people performed and expressed their grief had a particular moral and political significance in the First World War. Since burial rituals and rites of bereavement follow quite clearly defined gender patterns in the Western world, the changing meaning of certain customs and symbols in wartime had a different impact on men and women. The moral economy of grief during the First World War, this paper argues, was highly gendered and placed an expectation on women to bear the weight of their sacrifices with strength and to proudly endure emotional pain. Alongside gender this paper examines age, generation, location and class as mediating factors in the private experience and public expression of individual grief. Through changing rituals and shifting emotional responses over the war years, we can trace a fundamental shift in the social, cultural and political values attached to wartime death in Germany and Europe more broadly.