Barbie and the League of German Maidens

nospam@example.com (Rory Maclean) — Thu, 30 May 2013 07:35:00 +0200

    Would Barbie have joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel or BDM, the girls’ wing of the Nazi Party youth movement? Today the pink plastic doll may prefer a surfboard to a swastika banner, and her boyfriend Ken drive a Ford Thunderbird rather than a Königstiger battle tank, but could the world’s favourite ‘all-American doll’ – if she’d been invented in 1940 -- have been a model for German girls?

   I’m compelled to ask this question in response to the huge fuss surrounding the opening of the Barbie ‘Dreamhouse Experience’ in Berlin. Over the last two weeks, normally-sensible adults have burnt effigies of the emaciated plastic toy, crucified it and – to the delight of the mostly-male paparazzi – gone topless to protest against the ‘sexist propaganda’ of manufacturer Mattel.

   Given the vitriol of the demonstrations, one can’t help but wonder what’s really going on beneath the surface. Yes, Barbie is a naff, and her portrayal of femininity is both debasing and simplistic, but surely that isn’t reason enough to get into such a lather. To my mind, a greater issue has come to light. Maybe, just maybe, the protesters have realised that Barbie is the perfect German Maiden.

   The Bund Deutscher Mädel used uniforms, summer camps, pseudo-folklore and sport to educate and indoctrinate girls into the National Socialist belief system, and to train them for their role in German society as wives and mothers. Not so different then from Barbie, who dresses in spiffy outfits, goes RV camping with her sisters and female cousins (Skipper, Stacie, Kelly and Krissy) and embraces the great American myth in the course of her indoctrination into modern consumerist society.

   According to the 1940 BDM Youth Leadership pamphlet, new Jungmädel members were to aspire to ‘grow up to become obedient, service-minded and dutiful, and live in comradeship with those in the community’ and, aside from duties at home and in school, to play their part ‘voluntarily and joyfully’.

   At social evenings and sports afternoons, during day trips and week-long camps, the German Maidens had to show their ‘willingness to work together with others’, to demonstrate their courage and dexterity, and to prove themselves ‘to be dependable’, fulfilling their duties ‘consistently and proudly’.

   Which is Barbie all over. During the 50+ years of its existence, the virginal doll has been everything from aerobics instructor to nurse, army officer to paratrooper, paleontologist to ambassador for world peace, wedding stylist to McDonald’s cashier. And in every guise, Barbie has shown her willingness to work with others, to be dependable, to fulfil her role with joy.

   ‘A good Jungmädel never tries to get out of any of her tasks,’ instructed the 1940 BDM pamphlet. ‘She never says that she can’t do her tasks, that she’s afraid to do them, or worse yet, that she doesn’t want to fulfil them. A good Jungmädel always steps up to the tasks and sticks to them. Her way in the Jungmädel is straight and honest -- too proud and too open to lie to comrades or to suck up to leaders.’

   Of course back in those bad, ‘unpink’ years, BDM girls -- in order to meet the membership requirements -- had to be of German citizenship and German ‘heritage’. But then one mustn’t forget that Mattel’s Barbie was inspired by Bild Lilli, a German fashion doll spun off from a cartoon character in Hamburg’s Bild-Zeitung.

   So why the great hullabaloo over the arrival of Barbie’s plush plastic villa in Berlin? Because paradoxically, for better or for worse, Barbie is at heart a German.

   Or perhaps the protesters simply don’t like pink?

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Barbie and the League of German Maidens