Gisela Kriebel: A History of a German War Bride

Among the tens of thousands of GI war brides after the Second World War, a small fraction of them were German women who left their defeated and devastated homeland behind. The war story of Gisela Kriebel explores how her circuitous move from Berlin to Los Angeles, half a world away, meant the virtual severing of family ties and cultural connections that would leave her descendants with scant information about her genealogy and the fate of her family members in the war. Barriers of distance, language, and accessibility of records have made genealogical research particularly difficult concerning this specific population of war brides of defeated nations. The article explores Gisela Kriebel’s family, and specifically how she was conscripted into service in the war, began a career as an interpreter and secretary, and was swept up in two love affairs—one tragic and the other life-long—that, in the end, brought her to Los Angeles. Throughout the article, genealogical sources will be used, such as newly available online military records, to demonstrate how researchers can discover the rich family history of war brides separated from their war-torn homelands.

Managing Korean War Brides

This chapter examines the relationship between Americans and Korean women, both real and imagined. It begins in 1945 in South Korea with US militarized prostitution and its effects on Korean women. From assaults to regularization intended to protect US servicemen (but not Korean women) from sexually transmitted disease to US military efforts to prevent its men from marrying Korean nationals, the first part of the chapter establishes the uneven parameters placed upon Korean women. The chapter then moves to the United States to consider the cultural efforts made to uncouple the association between Korean prostitutes and brides. The chapter argues that US media’s hyper-focus on the purportedly docile (and, with US-occupied Japan a democratic stronghold in the Pacific, politically safe) Japanese bride supplanted an acknowledgment of Korean brides who arrived concurrently. It then looks to the popular singing, dancing, and instrument-playing Korean Kim Sisters, who through their celebrity and contained sexuality offered a safe alternative to the fraught figure of the Korean war bride. From military control to media representation, the chapter addresses how Americans tried to manage Korean women and how Korean women attempted to find security and autonomy amidst these pressures.

Happily Ever after Redemption

This chapter introduces two popular romance novels (romanzi rosa) by Luciana Peverelli. Published while the occupation of Rome was unfolding, La lunga notte (1944; The Long Night) and its sequel Sposare lo straniero (1946; Marry the Foreigner) treat those traumas using a hybrid form that results in arguably the earliest Italian fictional Holocaust narrative that represents the deportation of the Jews to camps and the Fosse Ardeatine massacre; unconscious of how its own anti-Semitic logic facilitates the deportation that it condemns, La lunga notte’s paradoxical treatment of Judaism aligns with dominant postwar Italian attitudes. Set during the Allied occupation, the sequel argues for the hybrid genre’s privileged position in narrating the transition back to “reality,” when the heroines become war brides, an often-vilified figure who proves an adept intercultural intermediary. Challenging preconceptions of the romance, La lunga notte and Sposare lo straniero alter the requisite happy ending for those “redeemed” by marriage.

The Redemption of Saint Paul

This chapter analyzes Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 (1978), the text that most widely perpetuated the gendered redemption paradigm traced in this book. As a British “wedding officer” in Naples, Lewis judges Neapolitan women, distinguishing war brides and rape victims among a sea of prostitutes. This work is not about determining the women’s status but about staging his redemption: starting as a hard-nosed officer, Lewis’s character “dies” and is reborn as the Dantean narrator, making his supposedly anti-fictional diary a conversion narrative, much like John Horne Burns’s The Gallery. As the chapter charts Officer Lewis’s conversion, it puts his diary-novel in dialog with The Gallery and Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (The Skin), whose spectacles Naples ’44 rewrites in more direct prose. Treated as anti-fictional by historians, Naples ’44 has arbitrated the sexuality of Neapolitan women and the men who love, purchase, or violate them. Lewis represents all Neapolitans as whores and all goumiers “as sexual psychopaths” and yet still emerges as the authoritative narrator. The chapter ends with a reflection on the contemporary cinematic adaption, Naples’44, directed by Francesco Patierno.