France and Germany Interwar Relationship

France and Germany Interwar Relationship

The two wars, WWI: 1914-18 and WWII:1939-45, brought Europe to the brink of destruction. Two of the major players, France and Germany, had a relationship between the wars which makes one think that WWII was merely a continuation of WWI. France and Germany had historical problems concerning territory and political influence, not to mention ideology, which precipitated in several wars, and continued during the uneasy peace between WWI and WWII.

The relationship between France and German between the two world wars was rooted in the causes of WWI. Population pressure was pushing Germany to expand its territory, economic growth made Germany a main power in Europe, but this did nothing to expand its actual land mass, France's negative growth population and its declining economic and military power made it a likely target, and the different ideologies, both social and spiritual, had historically caused friction between the two countries. European Imperialism in the late 1890s created even more rivalries.

Following WWI, France regained the territory of Alsace-Lorraine, but much of her territory was left in ruins and many of her native sons lay dead. The peace talks were held in Paris, and named for the regions where they were held. The treaty between Germany and France was suspect by France and England from the beginning. A seasoned statesman, Georges Clemenceau, worked tirelessly to put forward France's interests. She had not declared war until attacked, had lost the most, suffered the most damage, both property and economic, lost a whole generation of men and had the biggest rebuilding task of all the involved nations. Clemenceau wanted justice.

On the other hand, Wilson, president of the United States, dreamed of rebuilding Germany and having a prosperous German state join the international community. This was a brick wall to French recovery. France needed three major problems solved: protection from a Germany across a shared border, economic recovery and some way to pay the cost of rebuilding and recovery of her heavy industries. France desperately needed capitalization from without and access to German coal resources. With the damage done to her mines by German forces as they retreated, and even a war damaged Germany was stiff competition, so France needed concessions, favored treatment and help with the border protection. If England and the U.S. could provide border guards, and the U.S. would forgive the war debt, then there was hope for a French recovery. However, if France could not get help any other way, she needed a weakened Germany to compensate.

The three cornered dance which followed the armistice had Englan accusing the U.S. Of favoring France and Franc accusing England of conspiring again her needs being met in favor of Germany. It was true that after getting her own pound of Flesh, England preferred to see a prosperous Germany. She was also not disposed to forgive French war debts, since there was plenty of reconstruction to do in Britain. Everyone was sneaking behind someone else's back looking for an advantage.

The first thing on the agenda, by Wilson's design, was the establishment of The League of Nations. However, even this was seen from three different viewpoints. France hoped for a military force to keep the peace and punish aggressors. England was only in favor of moral or economic sanctions and the U.S. And Wilson saw it as preventative. The three nations created a great international organization and then pulled all its teeth. The League of Nations was still born, but it took some years before it was buried. It was totally ineffectual from the start.

Germany had supposedly embraced democracy with the creation of the Weimar Republic, but France did not believe it for a moment. France was bent upon the destruction of the unified German which the victory of 1871 had created. This would establish German inferiority. England and the United Stated opposed the idea, saying that this would sow the seeds of a new war. Instead they offered to extend the wartime coalition indefinitely. Instead the French proposed guarantee treaties, plus military safeguards including German disarmament, demilitarization, and Allied occupation of the Rhine.

Reparations were another sticking point, since every country had sustained damage, except the United States. Germany was expected to pay, but the coffers were empty. A crippled Germany could never pay up, so England favored keeping the country controlled but viable. The meetings ended in having Germany agree to a blank check, but no solid decisions were made concerning reparation or the stabilization of currencies.

In economic matters the French delegation laboured to improve the imbalance in heavy industry between Germany and France. At first Clemenceau fought hard for annexation of the Saar -- the French "frontier of 1814" -- and then settled for French control of the Saar coal mines and a League of Nations administration for 15 years, at which time the Saarlanders would hold a plebiscite to decide their permanent status. Germany was also obliged to deliver 20,000,000 tons of coal per year to France and Belgium and to allow the products of Alsace-Lorraine into Germany duty-free for five years." (Britannica 2006)

This was, at least, some help, though no percentage or fixed amount of reparation payments to accrue to the damaged England, France or Italy was decided. Instead, it was postponed.

The German army was limited to 100,000 and disarmed, while the left bank of the Rhine was occupied by allied forces. The British quit the meetings and went home in disgust when they made no headway with Wilson. Even so, nobody was happy with the treaty. Americans did not favor the obligation Wilson had agreed to, Germany felt the victim and France was certain that it had bought only a 20-year armistice and not a peace.

All of this set the stage for WWII, and the very strained relationship among all the powers during the interim. The relationship between France and Germany was particularly strained, as neither trusted the other. Germany still needed territory for its population and France needed material recovery. France looked with a jaundiced eye upon the new German democracy, with good reason as it turned out.

About the journey that this poetry represents:

wrote my very first verse when I was under 6. It was a song and my best friend put music to it. It was probably the best thing I will ever write, because it was untainted by the baggage we acquire as we grow up and mature. It took me nearly another 25 years before I felt comfortable saying I was a poet, because poetry grows within you in its own time.

Is poetry a reflection of life and culture or does it help shape life and culture? I don't really know, but I do know that my poetry shows my journey as a person from just before I found out that my husband had cancer until I finally managed to become a person again after nearly 14 years. Now I think that life doesn't become easier, but living it does as we learn to make grist from the gristle.

The time period this poetry covers is from before I lost my husband until only a couple of years ago after I lost everything else, except my children, including another man who preferred a younger prettier woman who would be satisfied with what HE wanted from life. A page turned in my life then, as I started over, owning and owned by nothing and no-one.

This collection of poetry is that journey, though there are some poems missing, perhaps also lost. (I will rewrite some). You don't have to crit seriously, though comments of any sort are, of course, welcome. I just don't want to pressure anyone or overwhelm you guys. However, I think these sort of belong together. What I would like is an impression. Are there any discernable holes? Do they seem in the right order? Which do you like best? Which do you think don't belong or don't work?

Along with these poems is an interview my daughter asked me to do for her via email while I was in California, near to the end of the time period covered by these poems. let me know if you think they go together. I may also add some of my daughter's poetry later with her permission. She is already leaving me in her dust at 25. She edited the interview and really jazzed it up later, but I can't find that right now. I am thinking of including pieces of both. Should the poetry be mixed in or follow the interview? I am feeling my way around here, trying to figure out how to make this work.

OK Larissa, here is your interview, rewritten to your specifications.

Obviously we would both be drinking coffee as you interview me. I might be fixing supper, maybe Ukrainian food. You might use a short introduction like:

walked into my mom's kitchen as she was about to prepare supper. She poured me coffee, and we sat at the table.

Larissa

Mom. Can I interview you for my class?

Mom

Sure, but aren't you getting a little desperate if you're stuck with me?

Larissa

Oh no. It fits the assignment. I have to interview my mother. So, first, where were your parents born?

Mom

My mother was born in San Francisco, and my father was born in Kansas City, Missouri

Larissa

Ok, and where were you born?

Mom

San Rafael, California

Larissa

All right. So what differences did you notice between your mother and yourself, generation wise and personality wise.

Mom

Wow, differences between us were so numerous that you would think we were not related. I mean you think you and I are different, and we are, but we do like some of the same things, and have some of the same values. The likenesses between me and my parents were only skin deep. My mother was the youngest of 7 children born during the depression, and she was used to getting everything she wanted. She was spoiled rotten. She had a twin brother and she was the darling of the family. Your great-grandfather was rich at the beginning of the depression, so his family never went without, but he was back to window washing by the end of it. My mother always had her family. I was an only child, and did not even know who my family was until I was about 7. Then when I was eight, my mother left.

Mom got up to refill the coffees, and get two bowls from the fridge.)

Larissa

Perohe?

Mom

Yep. You're going to stay for supper of course?

Larissa

Oh yes. So what happened after your mother left?

Mom

Well nothing so much really changed. I never had a stable home. I had only been with them not quite three years. So I started the rounds of relatives again, until I got fed up, and demanded to be a ward of the court. I ran away when I was thirteen, got caught, and had a long talk with the judge. It's a good thing for me I got one of the good ones. So I spent the last five years of school in a boarding home for girls run by nuns.

Larissa

The relatives, were they your mother's or father's?

Mom

Mostly my mother's. She had six brothers and sisters. I stayed with all but one of them. Uncle Bob I don't even remember at all. I just remember his name. I stayed with Grandma Ross, her mother, and my Aunt Phyllis and cousin Cookie for a year or so before I was five. I also stayed with her brother, Uncle Bill and his wife, Aunt Reete, and their kids. I was really close to my cousin Bunny for a long time. She was my age. Her real name was Rita. She had a bunch of brothers.

A stayed only a short time with Uncle Ken, my mother's twin brother, and I don't remember his wife's name. I was with Uncle Don, her brother, and Aunt Nancy and their kids about a year. Uncle Don was the only man in my family that I wasn't afraid of. He never tried to touch me. I spent the most time with my Aunt Valeria. I was with her before I was four for nearly a year with Uncle Alden, her husband at the time, and fifty boys on a ranch. The boys were delinquents, I think. She married one of the, Uncle Bart, after she divorced Alden. I stayed with her a year in San Francisco, and two years later on in Petaluma. I ran away when she started to get a little nuts. I heard she was insane when she died.

Larissa

So that's why you are so independent? You had to be?

Mom

Oh yes, I didn't get anything I didn't go after myself. My mother was totally dependent upon a man.

Even when she left, she left with a man. My father's boss. Me, I grew up totally independent. I was never in any one place long enough for the brainwashing to stick. I was the first in my family to get a degree. My mother and father both had high school diplomas, but my mother's ambition was solely to be taken care of by a man. I doubt if she ever had a single thought for developing her own talents.

Larissa

Why do you think she was the way she was? Why did she leave you and your father?

Mom

Oh I think it was her family mostly, and my father, I mean the whole idea of marriage and children must have seemed wonderful to her then, until she was alone with him and me. They used to fight all the time. I'd hear them at night. I didn't know then how overbearing and downright mean he could be. I guess I mean abusive. I don't really blame my mother for leaving, and, for a long time, I thought she should have taken me with her. Now, I doubt it would have made any big difference. She left with the same type, only he was a drunk on top of it all. I think she was what they call a co-dependent. My father always said that he didn't understand it that she left just when he was becoming successful.

Larissa

Whom did you admire when you were my age?

Mom

Well, let's see. It wasn't my parents. Between the ages of 18 and 22, I admired Joan Baez, Pat Boone, Bob Dylan, Helen Hayes, Robert Frost, Jaques Kerouac, T.S. Eliot, Rod McKuen, Shirley Temple Black, Jane Fonda, Grace Kelly, and Agatha Christie.

Larissa

Why did you admire them?

Mom

She peered at the list, then got up to start the Perohe) Joan Baez was a folk singer, but she was big on protest songs. The war in Vietnam was going on then, and it wasn't popular. She and Bob Dylan sang about it and war in general.

Frost, Kerouac, and Elliot were my favorite poets. I don't know if Frost was Poet Laureate then, but that's what he became. I wanted to be a poet then, but I just couldn't write like that. I think, maybe, I was just to self-centered at that time. I don't mean selfish or anything, just mostly concerned with my own needs and my own pain. I was too much inside it to write about it. Not that I write like any of them now, but at least I write poetry now. Then I just sort of bled on the page. It was really bad. Sometimes I find some of it and read it, and I wonder how I could have written that. It always sounds like a totally different person, and seems so long ago.

She looked at the list again as she put a big pot of water on to boil, and floured the top of the butcher block. She got the dough from the fridge, and began to roll it out.) Pat Boone, he was everything a girl wanted in a husband then. He was handsome, and his voice was like liquid gold, smooth and mellow. His image was one of the "All American Boy," and he wrote books too. I remember reading Twixt Twelve and Twenty.

Now Grace Kelly was the "All American Lady," a princess who married her prince. She had a big career in films, and she gave it up to become princess of Monaco. I mean we all admire royalty when they behave well, but Grace Kelly was special. She was American. I admired Queen Elizabeth too, because she was so young when she became queen, but she did the job. She didn't disappear while someone else did it. Remember, I was American then. I had only heard of Canada, and England was the mother country we left behind.

Who else is there?

Larissa

Shirley Temple Black, Helen Hayes, Jane Fonda, Rod MdKuen, and Agatha Christie.

Mom

Ok, well Rod McKuen was another poet, more modern, and he was young and handsome too. I read A Cat Named Sloopy, and it touched me so deeply that I felt like he knew me.

Agatha Christie I still read. She was just a great mystery writer. I never really felt I wanted to write mystery, but I think she would have been good in any genre.

Shirley Temple Black was the great child star who made good. She wasn't into politics herself yet, but you sort of knew she would be.

Then Helen Hayes was simply the best actress I ever saw. I don't remember which of her pictures I saw first, but she was fantastic. She could act without any words. I wanted to be her.

Larissa

What changes in gender roles have you noticed in your lifetime?

Mom

When I was born, few women worked, and those that did were generally restricted to certain jobs that were "suited" to the weaker sex.(She gestured with a limp wrist and a simpering look.) In high school most girls wanted to become secretaries or wives, usually secretaries to marry the boss or some other equally eligible man. Publicly there were only two genders, and I did not know about homosexuality until I was well into my twenties.

Larissa

You mean you hadn't heard of it? What about drugs?

Mom had heard of it, but had no idea what it really meant. I didn't hear about drugs until I was in college. I grew up with Ozzie and Harriet, and other very traditional families portrayed in the media. Television was becoming a powerful force in shaping American society, but men were in control. The roles of men and women were very strictly drawn along gender lines. Women only worked until they get married. Once married, they stayed home and washed floors and baked cookies.

Larissa

So that's why you hate housework, and went out to work?

Mom

I'm sure that's part of it, but I just never learned how. That's because I moved too much.

But it was common that when the man came home he expected to be greeted by a clean house, and a traditional dinner with the whole family.

At that time, in most places, women were almost chattel. They were not quite owned. A married woman had to have her husband's permission to buy anything on time or borrow money. It was acceptable for a woman to get a household allowance, but to have to ask to purchase even a winter coat. There was such a double standard that permeated the entire fabric of society. (She started to cut out the dough with a large glass which she pressed hard onto the board, and then twisted almost to punctuate her words.) Men who drank were "he men" (twist). Women who drank were lushes (twist). Men who had reputations for promiscuity while single were admired (twist). A woman who was not a virgin until she was married was a "slut" (twist). Though divorce existed, it was publicly frowned upon. A divorced woman was seen as "loose" (twist), while a divorced man was pitied (twist) for having been so mistreated. Child abuse and wife beating were never spoken of in public.

Larissa

Don't break the glass.

Mom

Oh, yeah. Funny, I never really though of myself as a feminist, but I guess I am. I guess I'm really as angry as the rest of them. Look at the movies of the forties and fifties, they show the roles society assigned to men and women. The double standard worked both ways, but, because the men were politically in power, they suffered much less.

The gender bias in the job market was seen as logical and right. Men could not become airline stewards, secretaries, or cocktail waiters. Male strippers did not exist. Men did not cry or show weakness in any way. Women did not cuss, drink, or stand up to anyone for their rights. It was expected they would get a man to defend them.

Probably the worst myth perpetuated by our parents was that a woman had to be mysterious and sneaky to get what she wanted from a man. This probably caused many communications problems among men and women. Smart women were expected to hide their intelligence. I could never do that! Too much pride, I guess. Women were permitted to enjoy sex within the bonds of marriage, but were not seen to need it. Right!

By the time I was twenty, it was changing. Ozzie and Harriet were replaced by Wonder Woman and Jane Fonda. (She raised one arm like she was about to fly, and flour flew about the kitchen.) Women could go to college, but only to catch a husband. They were still not expected to do anything tangible with their educations. Divorce was seen as possibly necessary in some cases, and not always the woman's fault. Women were getting into non-traditional work and politics. It was acceptable for a wife to work in order to help her husband in a tighter economy. Women burned their bras in public as a symbol of freedom, but they were still far from free. Bra burners were suspected of being homosexual. (She stacked the cut circles and began to fill them, placing them on a cookie sheet.

By the seventies, most married couples both worked, though a working wife still generally made much less than her husband. It was still expected that the wife would stay home once children were born. Any woman who worked by choice when she had children at home was "not a very good wife or mother." Those were the years of Marlo Thomas and "That Girl" on television. By this time we began to see some men staying home with the children while their wives worked, but they were still characterized as freaks or wimps. A "real" man (She flexes her arm muscle like a jock.) still didn't help around the house even if his wife worked all day. He did not change diapers or cook. There were sitcoms on television about role reversal, but the roles were still divided along gender lines. But by the end of this decade it was acknowledged that both men and women suffered from gender bias, and some advances were made. I needed my husband's signature for a loan for to buy out piano in 1975, but by 1980 that changed. (She stacked the cut circles and began to fill them, placing them on a cookie sheet.)

Single men with children were granted social services where they had been previously denied. Fathers were sometimes given sole custody of the children in a divorce. Joint custody was becoming the norm. Divorce was common.

The eighties, when you were a child, was the decade when most advances were made. A woman was prime minister of England. Strong women were not assumed to be male bashers. Women were accepted into previously all male colleges, and into courses of study involving math and science. They were even sometimes encouraged to follow this path in high school, though the number of female college freshmen with hard science or math backgrounds was still about ten percent. Equal pay for equal work became politically correct, though it is certainly not the reality even now. Women in sports were becoming popular. Female Olympic champions were admired, and not portrayed as unfeminine. There was even talk of a woman running for president, though that has not yet happened. However, when role reversal was portrayed it was treated with much more consideration for women. "The First Man" was an example of this. It was an exploration of our gender bias. Women could become engineers, but there were still men who wanted to turn back the clock. The massacre at Universite de Montreal pointed that out in a shocking and dramatic manner.

She covered the perohe with a kitchen towel and put it aside. Then she began filling another cookie sheet.) By this decade I began seeing many more women in college, and their salaries rose though still don't always equal the men's in the same jobs. I remember a letter that circulated at McGill that listed the jobs and salaries of men and women, and women still made as much as fifty percent less. Co-habitation is accepted, and women are consider to be sexual beings. There is still a glass ceiling in many corporations, but the ones that will survive will shatter that concept, as did Hewlett Packard recently. Did you know that their CEO is a woman? (She didn't wait for an answer.)

Many things have changed during my lifetime, and I suspect that mass media is largely responsible, just as it was responsible once for perpetuating the gender gap. The Berlin Wall fell because of mass media, and a political coup in Russia failed for the same reason. It is difficult to lie to people unless you control the media. This decade has seen unprecedented advances in mass communications, and the exponential growth of the totally anarchistic Internet. I have hopes that we may not only achieve gender equality during the next millennium, but that gender-based roles and judgments may yet disappear.