The family as a castle? The concept of family in literature and film in West Germany in the 1950s (German text)

In the beginning of the 1950s the very notion of individual and national identity was still suffering from the political and psychological ruptures of the past. Fascism, war and occupation had left Germany as a country marked by a social dialectic: a “crisis of masculinity” corresponding to Germany as a “country of women”, with women outnumbering men, many families being headed by a woman and women's functional emancipation through their past experience. The family became a central focus for reconstructing the devastated German nation and identity. Film and literature, in fact all mass media, played a crucial role in reflecting, concealing, or potentially disrupting the power relations defining the concept of the family.; My dissertation project traces the construction of the family within a series of literary and cinematic texts, demonstrating how shifts in representation reflect an evolving self-understanding in and of the new West German state. Thus the construction, definition and representation of the family is viewed against the background of cultural and political discourses in the 1950s in West Germany. The image of family becomes a key element in the discussion of a stabilized social order. The family also functions as the site where perceived dangers of a consumer society can be neutralized, increasingly so with the impact of the economic miracle of the mid 50s. Finally, the traditional family serves as a stronghold against the threats of Communism, which manifest themselves with the onset of the Cold War.; The dissertation examines a series of literary, filmic and cultural texts ranging from high to popular culture. These texts include the popular Heimatfilm Grün ist die Heide (1951) by Hans Deppe, Heinrich Böll's novel Haus ohne Hüter (1954), the film Das Mädchen Rosemarie (1958) by Hans Thiele and the novel Rosemarie, des deutschen Wunders schönstes Kind (1958) by Erich Kuby.