CC BY
12
M. R. Hatlie
Tubingen
The World Turned Upside Down: Armed Women in Riga in 1919
The presentation was a discussion of one small aspect of a dissertation on the subject of «Riga at War 1914 - 1920» which deals with the war experiences of the various national and religious groups among the population of Riga during the First World War, the Russian Civil War and the Latvian War of Independence. That one small aspect was the appearance of bands of armed women on the streets of Riga, a phenomenon which played an important rale in the German perception and memory of the period.
The German population of Riga experienced the war differently than other groups because of their unique ethnic and economic position. The period of Bolshevik rule in Riga during 1919 was known in German memoirs as the «Schreckenszeit» or «Time of Horror» and, in the memory of the German population, was characterized by hunger, loss of home, searches, arrests, persecution and murder.
One of the central symbols of the period in German perception and memory was the «Flintenweib» or «gun woman», a figure which appears again and again in German diaries written during the period and in memoirs written later. The «gun women» were armed Latvian women who were often seen together with Red Army soldiers or communist militia units. It has not yet been possible to firmly identify which unit or units these women belonged to. There seems to be little evidence of them in the archives at all. They were seen patrolling the streets, participating in searches of homes and businesses and were said to have taken a most active and enthusiastic part in the numerous executions that took place in the Central Prison and in Bikernieki forest near Riga.
In the German memoirs they are referred to as dirty, sexually perverted, drunken, and glad to participate in killings. They carry diseases and act like animals. They dress up in the luxurious clothing stolen from their victims. They are usually former whores and former domestic servants. As former domestic servants, they often return to the homes of their former «masters» to plunder and rob. When the Germans and Latvians freed Riga, they shot many of the gun women on sight. They were symbols of everything that had changed since the collapse of German power in the Baltic region. Power was no longer German, bourgeois and male, but Latvian, proletarian and female, The world had turned upside down.
Klaus Theweleit describes «Flintenweiber» in his book «Mannerphantasien» («Male Fantasies») in the context of the battles in Germany following the First World War between German Freikorps soldiers and armed proletarians. Theweleit studied the memoirs of German bourgeois soldiers that fought with the Freikorps. Some of the attributes that Theweleit sees ascribed to the gun women in those soldiers' memoirs are the same as those seen in the German texts on Riga. Theweleit attributes these «fantasies» to the soldiers' fear of women, fear of sexuality and their pre-fascist ideology. Theweleit's gun women are not even really armed. They are nurses and messengers. They appear armed and dangerous only in the minds of the sexually oppressed and castration-obsessed German bourgeois soldiers.
But there is evidence that the gun women of Riga were not purely the products of German fantasy. One important piece of evidence is the short memoir of a Latvian gun woman, written in 1959, in which she describes many of the kinds of events the Germans also mentioned. She even recalls hearing the word «Flintenweib». While this could be a faked memoir, written by the woman to establish a history of pro-Bolshevik activity and win privileges, it might be the beginning of a trail to follow in future research.
The discussion centered around questions involving the psychology of gender conflict and the previous history of German perceptions of Latvian women.
