An estimated 860,000 girls and women and an unknown number of boys and men were raped by American, French, British, and Soviet allied troops at the immediate war’s end of 1945 in Germany. These events are currently the largest known mass sexual violence atrocities in modern history. With a focus on U.S. allied troop post-1945 sexual violence as its case study, this paper explores a counter narrative, removed from the singular Cold War rhetorical prism toward the narrative of territoriality. How do borders and territory function as silence? How has the U.S. government tightly controlled, hence bordered, the silences around these mass rapes? How was the young, post-WWII German democracy – including post-German re-unification in 1990 – through its newly found territoriality complicit in the silencing? How has gender framed, constructed, produced and re-produced these bordered, political silences? And how have they endured? Based on original, new research in Germany and the U.S., this paper explores the gender-identity-state interaction generally and silence production within borders of national narratives, memories and historiographies specifically. Gender as an ordering principle is tremendously prolific within state identity discourses, the rhetorical borders of nationhood, national authenticity, the politics of belonging (autochthony) and the many forms of national otherings. Gender shapes and affects discourses of border construction linked to nation-building, state memory regimes including memory entrepreneurship, reconstruction and national post-war economies.

Dr. Sabine Hirschauer is an assistant professor with the Department of Government at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA. Her research interests include security studies, human security, migration, identity, and gender. She is the author of the book The Securitization of Rape: Women, War and Sexual Violence published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. She was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Bloemfontein, South Africa, with a research focus on gender-based violence. In 2017 and 2018, Dr. Hirschauer led two experiential-learning study-abroad courses to Munich, Germany where students worked with local refugee non-governmental organizations to explore local migration and integration challenges and opportunities. Most currently, Dr. Hirschauer writes about gender and international security, state identity and memory regimes, migration and policy failure in Europe and about the impact and effectiveness of international immersion programs and field experiences. She is originally from Munich, Germany.

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