{"id":6229,"date":"2015-04-10T16:19:02","date_gmt":"2015-04-10T16:19:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/?p=6229"},"modified":"2017-11-20T15:04:03","modified_gmt":"2017-11-20T15:04:03","slug":"veronikadankeschoen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/veronikadankeschoen\/","title":{"rendered":"Fr\u00e4ulein Veronika Dankesch\u00f6n"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my first posts on this blog was about the Tr\u00fcmmerfrauen,<\/a> the post-war German women who cleaned up their war-torn country while their men were away or missing. The way these women stepped out of their stereotypical roles as housewives and mothers to do what was seen as men\u2019s work is still talked about as a turning point in women\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

But not all<\/em> women took on the role of Tr\u00fcmmerfrau during this post-war period. A name was also given to a different type of post-war German woman: The Fr\u00e4ulein Veronika Dankesch\u00f6n.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In simple terms, the Veronika Dankesch\u00f6n was a woman who used sex to get what she needed. While the Tr\u00fcmmerfrau made money for her family through doing manual work re-building and cleaning up her city, Veronika Dankesch\u00f6n slept with allied American soldiers in exchange for money, food and cigarettes. Another term used for this type of woman was an Ami-Liebchen (\u2018American lover\u2019), which was practically synonymous with Dirne, Hure, Stra\u00dfenm\u00e4dchen,\u00a0Prostituierte<\/span><\/span> <\/em>(all words for prostitute)<\/em>. Not every woman who went out with an American soldier was a Veronika Dankesch\u00f6n, but any woman who did was treated with caution.<\/p>\n

Veronika is a German female name, while Dankesch\u00f6n means ‘thank you very much’. Veronika Dankesch\u00f6n was purposefully given this name because of its initials VD, which also stands for venereal disease <\/em>(Die Geschlechtskrankheit<\/em> in German). That was because these women were known to spread sexually transmitted diseases. There was a widespread epidemic of VD between German women and American soldiers in 1945, which American government officials were, unsurprisingly, not happy about. They believed that, far worse than being immoral, these ‘Veronika Dankesch\u00f6ns’ were undermining the soldiers and the entire American victory by spreading venereal disease to them!<\/p>\n

As a result, American officials launched a media campaign to try to prevent prostitution and German-American sexual relations.<\/p>\n

Here are a few examples of the poster campaign:<\/p>\n

\"SHE<\/a>

Photo by headovmetal on flickr.com under CC BY 2.0<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Loaded\"<\/a>

Photo by span112 on flickr.com under CC BY-SA 2.0<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Almost!<\/a>

Photo by currybet on flickr.com under CC BY-SA 2.0<\/p><\/div>\n

Bis zum n\u00e4chsten mal,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Constanze<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

One of my first posts on this blog was about the Tr\u00fcmmerfrauen, the post-war German women who cleaned up their war-torn country while their men were away or missing. The way these women stepped out of their stereotypical roles as housewives and mothers to do what was seen as men\u2019s work is still talked about…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":7467,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[337671,337670,375973,8882],"class_list":["post-6229","post","type-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-german-women","tag-trummerfrauen","tag-veronika-dankeschoen","tag-world-war-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6229"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9210,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6229\/revisions\/9210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}