Punished women: A historiographical analysis of the history writing on the ‘tyskerjenter’

Abstract

With this thesis I present the first historiographical analysis to be conducted on the history writing on the ‘tyskerjenter’ – the Norwegian women who engaged intimately with German soldiers during the German occupation of Norway. The analysis is based on a close and critical reading of texts, influenced by cultural historians’ reading of texts after the linguistic turn. In the first part of the thesis, I situate the historiography of the 'tyskerjenter' within the wider historiography of the occupation. I discuss why works dealing with this topic as history started emerging precisely in the mid-to-late 1980s, as well as why this history has been granted strikingly little attention by Norwegian historians, despite the sustained interest within the discipline for topics pertaining to Norway’s experience of the Second World War. I argue that part of the answer to this is to be found in how the history of these women can be perceived as a particularly ‘difficult history’ in multiple respects, as well as in how this history is considered part of what has widely been conceived of as a less interesting and even marginal part of history. In this part I also examine how the history of the 'tyskerjenter' has been written and imagined, and identify and discuss silences, as well as what I argue constitutes an interesting ‘empty space’, in the historiography. In the second part of the thesis, I examine the ways in which the often brutal punishment of these women during and after the war has been interpreted. Here, I transcend the national narrative by also scrutinising prominent interpretations of the sanctioning of women accused of ‘fraternisation’ with the Germans during the Danish and French occupations, and by discussing whether the interpretations from the three national contexts interact with each other. I also engage in a critical discussion of the understanding of the head shaving of women accused of this transgression as a ‘European’ phenomenon. Furthermore, I argue that the Norwegian historiography is strikingly empiricist and discuss potential reasons for this. Lastly, I demonstrate that there has been interestingly little conversation between the interpretations from the three national contexts, particularly when considering the widespread understanding of this punishment as ‘European’.