Sex under occupation: intimacy, entertainment, and conflict in the French Zone of Occupation in Germany, 1945-1955
Publication Date
July 31, 2026
Creator
Leonie Bausch
University of Nottingham
Abstract
Occupation is generally considered an extraordinary status, characterised by its temporary nature, the use or threat of force, ruling via a makeshift government, and the presence of a foreign, hostile army. Yet many aspects of “ordinary” life – including sex – continued in these periods. This thesis examines a multiplicity of sexual encounters between members of the French occupation forces stationed in Germany from 1945 to 1955 (including colonial soldiers, predominantly from Morocco and Algeria) and local residents (predominantly German women). The occupation offered distinct risks and benefits for sexual encounters, including differing access to resources, mobility and legal protection and/or repercussions. Yet, I posit that these extraordinary circumstances were interwoven with ordinary routine and priorities: people went to work, they spent leisure time with their family and friends and had a drink in the local pub, they experienced sexual harassment and went out on a date, they got married and made plans for the future. Located at this intersection of ordinary- and extraordinariness, sex under occupation is a story of both occupation and of everyday life.
French occupation rendered patterns of sexual encounters that would otherwise remain implicit and unrecorded more pronounced and visible, both to contemporary observers and to historians. Tracing a range of regulations, individual encounters, and policing efforts and transitioning from violent encounters to selling and buying sex to dating to marriages, this thesis offers insights into individuals’ everyday sexual encounters and how the everyday interacted with state bureaucracy’s desire for order and proposes occupations as fertile ground for studying sexuality. Reflecting on how to write about sex, I suggest that everyday life history, together with critical fabulation and thick description, opens up an opportunity to put ourselves with rather than above our research subjects and to present complex interactions as multi-faceted and in excess of neat categorisation.
Occupation accorded an extraordinary visibility to these “ordinary” everyday encounters. French and German authorities increased policing efforts of supposedly “immoral” women going out with and possibly selling sex to French servicemen; “ordinary” people noticed soldiers walking arm in arm with young women; and documentation produced by the occupation forces have created fruitful source collections for historians. Sex under Occupation demonstrates that occupation is both a political phenomenon and a material reality, as people interacted and were made visible and observed in both physical and symbolic space.
Item Type
ethesis
Thesis Type
PhD
Supervisors
University of Nottingham
Purseigle, Pierre
University of Warwick
Subjects (LC)
Associated Schools / Departments
UoN Repository URI
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