German Women Not Yet For Peace
By Gertrude Baumer, President of the Bund Deutscher Frauen.
An emphatic refusal of German women to take part in the recent Women's Peace Conference at The Hague was issued by the Bund Deutscher Frauen (League of German Women) signed by Gertrude Baumer as President, and published by the Frankfurter Zeitung in its issue of April 29, 1915. The manifesto reads:
On April 28 begins the Peace Congress to which women of Holland have invited the women of neutral and belligerent nations. The German woman's movement has declined to attend the congress, by unanimous resolution of its Executive Committee. If individual German women visit the congress it can be only such as have no responsible position in the organization of the German woman's movement and for whom the organization is, therefore, not responsible.
This decimation must not be understood to mean that the German women do not feel as keenly as the women of other countries the enormous sacrifices and sorrows which this war has caused, or that they refuse to recognize the good intentions that figure in the institution of this congress. None can yearn more eagerly than we for an end of these sacrifices and sorrows. But we realize that in our consciousness of the weight of these sacrifices we are one with our whole people and Government; we know that the blood of those who fall out there on the field cannot be dearer to us women than to the men who are responsible for the decisions of Germany. Because we know that, we must decline to represent special desires in an international congress. We have no other desires than those of our entire people: a peace consonant with the honor of our State and guaranteeing its safety in the future.
The resolutions that are to be laid before the women's congress at The Hague are of two kinds. One kind denounces war as such, and recommends peaceful settlement of international quarrels. The other offers suggestions for hastening the concluding of peace.
As concerns the first group of suggestions, there are in the German woman's movement women who are in principle very much in sympathy with the aims of the peace movement. But they, too, are convinced that negotiations about the means of avoiding future wars and conquering the mutual distrust of nations can be considered only after peace has again been concluded. But we must most vigorously reject the proposition of voting approval to a resolution in which the war is declared to be an "insanity" that was made possible only through a "mass psychosis." Shall the German women deny the moral force that is impelling their husbands and sons into death, that has led home countless German men, amid a thousand dangers, from foreign lands, to battle for their threatened Fatherland, by declaring in common with the women of hostile States that the national spirit of self-sacrifice of our men is insanity and a psychosis? Shall we psychologically attack in the rear the men who are defending our safety by scoffing at and deprecating the internal forces that are keeping them up? Whoever asks us to do that cannot have experienced what thousands of wives and mothers have experienced, who have seen their husbands and sons march away.
Just as in these fundamental questions the women of the belligerent States must feel differently from those of neutral States, so, too, there is naturally a difference of opinion among the women of the different belligerent States concerning the time of the conclusion of peace. Inasmuch as the prospects of the belligerent States depend upon the time of the conclusion of peace and therewith the future fate of the nations involved in the war, there can likewise be no international conformity of opinion on this question either.
Dear to us German women as well, are the relations that bind us to the women of foreign lands, and we sincerely desire that they may survive this time of hatred and enmity. But precisely for that reason international negotiations seem fraught with fate to us at a time when we belong exclusively to our people and when strict limits are set to the value of international exchange of views in the fact that we are citizens of our own country, to strengthen whose national power of resistance is our highest task.