During the Allied occupation of Germany, educators asked students to write about their feelings and experiences of youth before and after the Second World War. This article uses Abitur and Reifeprüfung examination essays written by young German women, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three, to explore how they performed and represented their emotional subjectivities in early postwar Berlin. First, it examines how young women used selective strategies of forgetting and remembering to repress their troubling emotional memories of the regime. Second it explores how women achieved some level of psychic comfort, through a selective remembering of their home lives and Bund Deutsche Mädel experiences by developing different emotional coping mechanisms. The article argues that young women’s emotional renegotiation was not a passive process as previously thought, but rather based on young women’s active and astute reading of the postwar emotional climate. Subjecting these emotional subjectivities to greater attention elucidates a key, but hitherto underexplored, stage in these young people’s lives.

中文翻译：

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战后德国的成年：1946-50 年年轻女性寻找新的情感主体

在盟军占领德国期间，教育工作者要求学生写下他们在二战前后的青年感受和经历。本文使用由 14 至 23 岁的德国年轻女性撰写的 Abitur 和 Reifeprüfung 考试论文，探讨她们在战后柏林早期如何表现和表现她们的情感主体。首先，它考察了年轻女性如何使用选择性的遗忘和记忆策略来压抑她们对政权的令人不安的情感记忆。其次，它探讨了女性如何通过发展不同的情绪应对机制，选择性地回忆她们的家庭生活和 Bund Deutsche Mädel 的经历，从而获得某种程度的心理安慰。文章认为，年轻女性的情绪重新谈判并非之前认为的被动过程，而是基于年轻女性对战后情绪氛围的积极而敏锐的解读。让这些情感主体受到更多关注，阐明了这些年轻人生活中一个迄今为止尚未充分探索的关键阶段。