Abstract.  Not to be cited, quoted, or circulated without author's permission. 

In the Federal Republic's formative years, the Law to Aid Victims of War (Bundesversorgungsgesetz) was the bedrock of the West German welfare state.  West Germany's first major piece of social legislation, it was the second largest item in the state's budget, and its provisions touched a fifth of the population.  Highly gendered, it described a neat postwar "family" of wounded veterans, war widows, and war orphans -- or, more simply, men, women, and children.  Identifying beneficiaries by their relationship to an event of the Nazi era -- the Second World War -- lawmakers also sharply contrasted the Law's provisions to the military occupation's and East Germany's treatment of the same population.  It thus served as a key location for West Germany's attempts to define its relationship both to the late Nazi regime and to the East German state.  Three phenomena were thus intertwined:  the shaping of the welfare state, the formation of West German national identity, and the construction of gender in the new state. 

By declaring wounded veterans to be victims of war, the Federal Republic created for its male citizens a comfortable distance from the Nazi regime:  military men, presumably, could not share responsibility for the destruction wrought by the Nazis' war if they and their survivors were among its victims.  Equally significantly, the Law to Aid Victims of War rejected East Germany's insistence that military men were in fact co-perpetrators, not victims, and hardly deserving of special pensions.  The contrast between West Germany's generosity and East Germany's parsimony towards wounded veterans contributed to the impressions of Germans on both sides of the border that West Germany cared for its citizens better than did East Germany.  By casting veterans into the passive (and feminized) role of victim, however, the Law made yet more urgent the task of restoring wounded men's masculinity.  Part of the larger social project of the "remasculization of West Germany," the Law pointedly made vocational training and consideration of veterans' dependents central to the program. 

Equally pointedly, the Law did not provide vocational training for widows, nor it did consider dependents in the calculation of widows' pensions.  Instead, it reinforced widows' dependence on their husbands -- extending this dependence, as it were, beyond the grave.  In doing so, it upheld a principle long honored by welfare states:  that the economic circumstances of women who were or had been married should by determined by their husbands'' (or late husbands') activities.  But West German widows' pensions did not just follow general principle.  They also effectively restored individual pensions the Nazi regime had awarded military dependents and survivors, declaring illegitimate the occupation authorities' revocation of such pensions.  In adopting widows' pensions, the Federal Republic also loudly trumpeted its distance from East Germany, which eliminated widows' pensions and argued more generally for women's paid labor on the grounds that women could and should labor for their own sustenance.  In its symbolic recognition of wounded veterans and survivors as victims, in its material benefits, and in its gender specific provisions, the Law to Aid Victims of War simultaneously legitimized the young Federal Republic and shaped its citizens' gendered relationship to the new state. 

Thesis.  Welfare provisions provided a location for the simultaneous construction of gender and national identity.  In the formative years, pensions for wounded veterans and war widows helped West Germany to define "ordinary Germans" as victims of the Nazi regime, and they provided a forum for West Germany to demonstrate that it saw to its citizens' needs better than East Germany did.  Both of these projects were highly intertwined with establishing a gendered relationship between West Germans and welfare state, as pensions functioned materially and rhetorically to remasculize men while reinforcing women's dependence.