“If it wasn't for love…”, propaganda postcard

In 1976, when Die Biene Maja [Maya the Bee] flew onto the television screen as a cartoon character and Karel Gott contributed the title song that would later become a pop hit, Waldemar Bonsels’s most famous character was making her second triumphant sweep across the German-speaking world. The fact that Bonsels’s book was considered a ‘classic’ on the Front during the First World War is largely unknown today.

The outbreak of the First World War saw a change in accepted gender roles. Where there had previously been an opposition of masculine/public and feminine/private, a new form of differentiation emerged, defining the front as masculine and the home(land) as feminine.