“Girls were seen crying when soldiers departed.†Belgian and French women and German soldiers: transgressive relationships under the gaze of the occupied population

Between 1914 and 1918, the German army occupied Belgium and large parts of France. One important feature of the occupation was the gender imbalance and, as such, these French and Belgian territories were often the theatre of encounters between the occupation soldiers and local women. Intimate relationships among them were not uncommon: one can find comments about them in two thirds of the diaries kept by people living under the German occupation. This article is based on the analysis of a corpus of 110 such diaries, revealing the way people perceived and judged these relations, but also the va... Mehr ...