Not Supposed to be Born?: Narratives of Impossible Motherhood and Children Born of War Rape in Germany and Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Drawing from two published literary narratives, the German wartime diary by Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, and the novel based on women’s testimonies of war rape and unwanted pregnancies in Bosnia by Slavenka Drakulić, S.: A Novel About the Balkans, in addition to published testimonies and unpublished interview data by now young adult (in the case of Bosnia) and elderly (in the case of Germany) children born of war rape (CBOWR), this article examines the intergenerational impact of wartime sexual violence. Applying feminist narrative analysis, the authors demonstrate the situation of “impossible motherhood” and experiences of children who were not supposed to be born. The article focuses on the narrative process marked by trauma but also by agency and resilience so as to challenge dominant stories of war and unwanted pregnancy following rape in armed conflict. The authors propose a resolution of tensions around the ethnic identity of CBOWR along their maternal lineage rather than the imposition of the paternal heritage of the enemy.

Full text

1 Canadian Journal of European and Russian Studies, 16 (3)2023: 1-29
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Not Supposed to be Born? Narratives of Unwanted Pregnancy, Impossible Motherhood,
and Children Born of War Rape in Germany and Bosnia and Herzegovina
1
Agatha Schwartz, University of Ottawa
Christabelle Sethna, University of Ottawa
Danielle Lyn Carron, Carleton University
Abstract
This article examines the intergenerational impact of sexual violence in conflict zones by
drawing from two published literary narratives—the German wartime diary by Anonymous, A
Woman in Berlin, and the novel based on women’s testimonies of war rape and unwanted
pregnancies in Bosnia by Slavenka Drakulić, S.: A Novel About the Balkans—in addition to
published testimonies and unpublished interview data by children born of war rape (CBOWR)
in Germany and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Applying feminist narrative analysis, the authors
demonstrate the situation of “impossible motherhood” and the experiences of children who were
not supposed to be born. The article focuses on the narrative process marked by trauma but also
by agency and resilience to challenge dominant stories of war and unwanted pregnancy
following rape in armed conflict. The authors propose a resolution for tensions around the ethnic
and national identity of CBOWR along what they call maternal lineage as opposed to the
imposition of the children’s stigmatized paternal heritage.
1
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under
grant number 430-2016-00232, titled “‘Children of the Enemy’: Narrative Constructions of Identity Following
Wartime Rape and Transgenerational Trauma in Post-WWII Germany and Post-Conflict Bosnia” with Agatha
Schwartz as the principal investigator and Christabelle Sethna, Mythili Rajiva, and Tatjana Takševa as co-
investigators. Danielle Lyn Carron was one of the student researchers hired to work on this project.

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Introduction
The appearance of American second-wave feminist Susan Brownmiller’s blockbuster, Against
Our Will: Men, Women and Rape coincided with agitation for women’s reproductive rights and
opposition to American involvement in a war that encompassed the rape and murder of
Vietnamese civilians as well as the birth of Vietnamese children fathered by American soldiers
(Brownmiller 1975). Significantly, Brownmiller held that in peacetime and wartime, rape is a
traumatic experience common to women, rape in wartime is a magnification of rape in
peacetime, and the sequelae of rape, apart from injury, disease, and death, are unwanted
pregnancy, abortion, and the birth of children. In a recent article on the use of sexual violence
in the current war in Ukraine, acclaimed Croatian writer and feminist Slavenka Drakulić
reiterates some of Brownmiller’s findings, emphasizing that in armed conflict, rape is used as a
weapon of war (Drakulić 2022). Drakulić establishes a parallel between Ukraine and two earlier
episodes of sexual violence in conflict zones, namely the mass rape during the war in former
Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina
2
during the early 1990s, and the rape of
German women at the end of WWII.
3
Between 1992 and 1995 in war-torn multi-ethnic Bosnia,
the Serbian-led Yugoslav army aided by local Serb militia engaged in ethnic cleansing that
included the systematic mass rape and forced impregnation of primarily Bosniak (Muslim)
women (Schwartz and Takševa 2020; Skjelsbaek 2012; Snyder et al. 2006; Stiglmayer 1994).
At the time, the spotlight on Bosnia brought renewed focus on the mass rape of German women
at the end of WWII, primarily by members of the Red Army, which was controversial, given
Germany’s war guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust (Gebhardt 2015b; Grossmann 1995,
2011).
This article invokes these two episodes in twentieth-century European history using a selection
of narratives to analyze the complex interplay of victimization and stigmatization on the one
hand and agency and resilience on the other. The authors examine the far-reaching personal and
social consequences of sexual violence against women in conflict zones, with an emphasis on
unwanted pregnancy, abortion, and children born of war rape (CBOWR). These themes are
introduced through an analysis of two published literary narratives of war rape from the
perspective of the women—the German wartime diary by Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin
(1954), and a novel based on the survivors’ testimonies in Bosnia by Drakulić, S.: A Novel
About the Balkans (1999)—and through published and unpublished first-person narratives from
elderly (in the case of Germany) and young adult (in the case of Bosnia) CBOWR. While the
specific categories to which these narratives belong may differ, they can all be subsumed under
the umbrella term “life writing” as defined by Suzette Henke, who expands the category
traditionally limited to autobiography to include memoirs, diaries, and letters but also various
“personally inflected fictional texts” (Henke 1998, xiii). Taken together, these narratives shed
light on the intergenerational impact of sexual violence in the context of what Yana Hashamova
describes as “impossible motherhood” (Hashamova 2012, 214). This concept wrestles with the
tension between what the authors of this article call maternal lineage versus paternal heritage,
thereby giving rise to the contested identities of CBOWR and the possibility of a solution
2
Hereafter referred to as “Bosnia” for brevity’s sake.
3
Similar to Drakulić, Daina S. Eglitis also draws on the legacy of these two episodes of sexual violence in
conflict to explain the use of rape as a strategy of war used by the Russian forces in Ukraine (Eglitis 2022).

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beyond the lines of ethnic and national divisions surrounding their existence. Regardless of the
different historical contexts and the decades that separate these two episodes of sexual violence
in war as well as the generational gap between the two groups of CBOWR, the similarities
revealed in the narratives are remarkable.
4
Methods and Methodologies
As feminist scholars, the authors of this article seek to capture what is remembered, what is put
into words, and what is left out of the narratives in order to understand how the narrators
construct an image of an acceptable self that gives them agency over loss but also over dominant
patriarchal discourses about war, violence, and ethnic and national identity. In addition to the
published literary narratives in the English translations of Anonymous and Drakulić, a personal
testimony—mundtot by Jürgen Schubert published in German—, a published collection of first-
person narratives translated from German into English as Thistleflowers  Russian Children in
Germany by a collective of the same name, and interview data from Bosnian CBOWR available
online were used. Finally, open-ended, semi-structured life history interviews (Woods 2010)
with some members of Thistleflowers (Distelblüten) were conducted in German between 2016
and 2017 by one of the authors of this article (Schwartz). They were recorded, transcribed, and
translated into English with the participation of other research team members. The broadly
formulated interview questions allowed the participants to tell their stories on their terms and
self-identify as they wished. The interviews met the requirements of the University of Ottawa’s
Research Ethics Board. All data are used in a way that strictly respects the participants’ consent.
The authors base their method of interpretation on a combination of feminist oral history and
narrative methodology. Feminist oral history emphasizes the importance of valuing women’s
experiences in a patriarchal cultural context that has historically silenced and controlled their
voices (Anderson and Jack 1991). According to Marianne Hirsch, it is about restoring
“experiences and life stories that might otherwise remain absent from the historical archive”
(Hirsch 2012, 15). In order to access those stories, feminist researchers need to engage in
“listening with the third ear” (Anderson and Jack 1991, 19) to better comprehend how difficult
experiences may be avoided or expressed indirectly in a narrative. In analyzing such narratives,
one must focus both on the “whats” and the “hows” of the narrative process. Jaber F. Gubrium
and James A. Holstein define the “whats” as the content and the themes encompassed by the
narrative, while the “hows” are the ways through which the experiences related in the narrative
are formulated (Gubrium and Holstein 2009, 7). Despite the various narrative forms examined,
the narratives are united by the fact that they are rooted in difficult memories around which “the
will to tell a story cannot be taken for granted” and where “one can also easily think of situations
where the facts of the narration are too painful or traumatic for direct expression” (Slembrouck
2015, 247). Therefore, listening with the third ear enables the researcher to understand the
complex narrative interplay of trauma and loss but also resilience and survival.
4
As other scholars have demonstrated, rape in war is a complex phenomenon and may not necessarily be used as a
strategy in every episode of armed conflict (Kulick 2022; Wood 2010). However, regarding both WWII (Beevor
2002; Mühlhäuser 2017; Roberts 2008) and the war in Bosnia (Allen 1996; Snyder et al. 2006), it has been
repeatedly argued that rape was used as a weapon of war, and the same has been said for numerous other episodes
of armed conflict as well. The aim of this article, however, is not to further theorize sexual violence in war.

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Rape as a Weapon of War, CBOWR, and Impossible Motherhood
The mass rape of women in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s heightened global awareness of
sexual violence against women in conflict zones and its use as a weapon of war, perpetrated to
violate the collective body of the enemy (Card 1996; Ivekovic and Mostov 2002; Seifert 1996).
While rape in war had already been considered a war crime in WWII (albeit with few penalties
for the perpetrators), it was at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY 1993-2017) that for the first time, war rape was included as a crime against humanity.
Feminist interventions into the ICTY and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR
1994–2015) helped define rape as a means of perpetrating genocide through the interplay of
misogyny, ethnic hatred, and racism in the systematic mass rape and forced impregnation of
women (Schwartz and Takševa 2020). However, some researchers criticized the “homogenising
narrative of rape as an instrument of the genocide” (Buss 2009, 160) and the ways in which it
reinforced gender and ethnic stereotypes along the victim and perpetrator line (Simic 2012).
Although the definition of rape came under scrutiny in recent years—as it can mean oral,
vaginal, or anal penetration with a body part or an object and may or may not involve coercion,
violence, or the threat of violence (Branche and Virgili 2012; Močnik 2018)—and it could be
complicated by what Anna Hájková (2013) calls “sexual barter”, the authors’ attention is on
one of the main outcomes of wartime sexual violence: unwanted pregnancies and CBOWR.
5
Estimates of rape-related pregnancies are usually in the five percent range (Gebhardt 2015a)
but may be higher (Lee 2017). Although abortion may be legal in some countries in wartime,
contraception and/or abortion services are often unavailable, illegal, or difficult to obtain in a
timely fashion from medical personnel, making women especially vulnerable to an unwanted
pregnancy resulting from rape (Seto 2013; Swiss and Giller 1993).
CBOWR is a subcategory of children born of war (CBOW), and according to researchers
studying the intergenerational impact of sexual violence against women in conflict zones, it
needs special consideration. While both categories of children face stigmatization and rejection
(Carpenter 2007, 2010; Lee 2017; Lee, Glaesmer, and Stelzl-Marx 2021; Lee and Mochmann
2015; Satjukow and Gries 2015; Stelzl-Marx and Satjukow 2015), CBOWR face additional
challenges given their violent conception (Glaesmer 2015; Roupetz, Delic, and Glaesmer 2021;
Schwartz 2020). In the words of Virginia M. Bouvier: “There is a tremendous knowledge gap
surrounding the issue of children born of conflict-related sexual violence, and even less public
policy to address the needs of these children” (Bouvier 2016, 8). The derogatory names applied
to CBOWR in diverse conflicts—“Russian brat” in Germany or “Chetnik bastard” in Bosnia—
signal the discrimination they face in common but also the patriarchal premium on what we call
paternal heritage that is used by their mothers’ ethnic community to obscure, deny, or even
obliterate their maternal lineage. The longstanding belief that paternity alone is responsible for
the transmission of identity ethnicizes and nationalizes rape, setting CBOWR apart from the
ethnic identity of the mother (Močnik 2020).
5
Similar research on men and boys has grown significantly in recent years (Clark 1996; Gebhardt 2015a; Touquet
and Gorris 2016). However, the authors’ focus in this article is only on women.

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The stigmatized paternity of CBOWR defies the idea of nations as ethnically homogenous and
works to abort CBOWR from an ethnically “pure” national body. CBOWR can be subjected to
infanticide, abandonment, institutionalization, maternal neglect, or adoption. Like their
mothers, they can be rejected by their communities, their sense of belonging may be questioned,
and their well-being compromised (Lee 2017; Mochmann 2017; Roupetz, Delic, and Glaesmer
2021). In her exploration of Drakulić’s S.: A Novel About the Balkans, Hashamova asserts that
mothers who raise such children are trapped in a situation of impossible motherhood. The term
itself may sound misleading as it could suggest that mothering CBOWR is inevitably an
impossible task to accomplish, which is not always the case. What is implied in impossible
motherhood is rather the struggle of loving one’s own flesh and blood because it is othered as
the child of an ethnic “ultimate Other” (Hashamova 2012, 241) and due to the strong social
pressures to reject and abandon children fathered by the enemy. The authors suggest that one
possibility of resolving this difficult situation for both mother and child is to circumvent the
patriarchal significance placed on paternity. The acceptance of maternity, albeit reluctant, can
be accomplished only by the psychological and, eventually, legal erasure of the child’s paternal
heritage and the mother’s and child’s sole identification with the child’s maternal lineage. This
process, however, is a daunting task to the point of making mothering CBOWR almost
unfeasible. Nena Močnik elaborates on the impossibility of impossible motherhood for Bosnian
women rape survivors and their CBOWR. The women’s struggle between their identity as a
“war-rape survivor, on the one hand, and a mother, on the other” (italics in the original)
(Močnik 2020, 4) is exacerbated when they are unable to count on any emotional support,
receive neither reparations nor public recognition, or are perceived to have been “sexually
disgraced” (Močnik 2020, 56).
Mothers of CBOWR and CBOWR themselves both risk being marked in terms of personal
identity exclusively as casualties of war, and their plight can be instrumentalized for a host of
reasons (i.e. to render defeated nations as more victim than victimizer, bring perpetrators to
court, or demand justice and reparations) (Helms 2013; Močnik 2018, 2019). Both mothers and
children walk a tightrope between silence and speech, victim and survivor, passivity and agency
as opposed to following, individually or collectively, heavily mediated and over-determined
scripts of victimhood (Schwartz and Takševa 2020). While some demonstrate extraordinary
resilience, it should not be downplayed that they often experience palpable traumatic outcomes
affecting their physical and mental well-being across generations (Močnik 2020).
A Woman in Berlin and S.: A Novel About the Balkans
The selected two narratives from the German and Bosnian contexts, respectively, illustrate how
sexual violence in conflict zones affects the women and the choices they face in dealing with
its undesired outcomes, first and foremost, unwanted pregnancy and, subsequently, CBOWR.
Through these narratives, the authors introduce and contextualize the themes discussed in this
article. One of the best-known literary narratives dealing with wartime rape and its
consequences is A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous. The diary was first published in English
in 1954 and in German in 1959 (after being translated into several languages) and republished

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in Germany posthumously in 2003.
6
It has been called “one of the most important personal
accounts ever written about the effects of war and defeat” (Beevor 2005, xxi) and was used by
Max Färberböck as the basis for his homonymous 2008 feature film Anonyma – Eine Frau in
Berlin. However, despite this narratives’ relevance, the author’s credibility “was disputed, an
all-too-common pattern in dealing with rape victims” (Gebhardt 2016, 12).
Nazi Germany had conducted a ferocious campaign on the Eastern front that included German
troops’ mass rape of women and the annihilation of Jews, Slavs, and Communists (Mühlhäuser
2010, 2017). By early January 1945, the Red Army’s counteroffensive had turned the tide of
war. The author depicts the shelling, deprivations, and mass rape after the Red Army occupied
Berlin in late April 1945, some weeks before the capitulation of Germany. The women of Berlin
tremblingly await the Soviet army as their arrival is preceded by numerous accounts of rape—
some by survivors who fled to Berlin—on the Eastern front. Soviet soldiers are configured as
rapacious “wolves,” ignorant “Ivans,” and drunken “Mongols,” reflecting years of racialized
Nazi anti-Soviet propaganda (Grossmann 1995b, 50). Anonymous is surprised to find a
Russian-made condom in a room she was cleaning, admitting she “didn’t know they [Russians]
even knew there were such things. In any case, where German women were concerned, they
didn’t feel it was worth the trouble” (Anonymous 2005, 158). Although she is convinced that
she will not become pregnant, rumours circulate that “every second woman is,” followed by the
reassurance that “you could go to anyone and have it taken care of,” (195) implying the
existence of abortion providers who may or may not be medical personnel. The narrative leaves
a gap, however, as to whether the narrator herself may eventually fall among the high percentage
of women who became pregnant against their will.
The diarist decides to protect herself from random attacks and humiliations by attaching herself
to a Soviet major. Their personal relationship may be categorized as sexual barter as it shields
Anonymous from the predations of other soldiers and allows her access to much-needed
resources while providing the major with the company of an educated woman. Toward the end
of the diary, Anonymous, contrary to her earlier optimism regarding the improbability of
pregnancy, visits a doctor who confirms that her period is late. The doctor attributes her late
period to the fact that she, like many other malnourished women in wartime, may be calorie
deficient and clouds the answer to Anonymous’s question whether she provides abortions for
pregnancies resulting from sexual violence in ambiguity: “It is better not to speak of such
things” (246). In this brief episode, the narrator is likely an unreliable one. Is it the doctor trying
to shroud wartime abortions in silence, or is it the narrator herself who diverts the reader’s
attention from a suspicion of unwanted pregnancy brushed off under the rationalization of
calorie deficiency? After all, how could have numerous other calorie-deficient women become
pregnant? It could well be that Anonymous was pregnant and that the doctor performed an
abortion on her, but admitting to it would have been taboo even for this unusually frank
narrative. Hence the innuendo: “It is better not to speak of such things.”
More than half a century after the end of WWII and the publication of Anonymous’ diary,
Drakulić published S.: A Novel About the Balkans, which also thematizes rape in war and
6
The authors of this article respect the author’s wish to refer to herself as Anonymous although a German
journalist made her alleged identity public following the posthumous new edition of the diary (Schwartz 2015).

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unwanted pregnancy but within the context of the war in Bosnia. While the collapse of the
Soviet Union led to the peaceful unification of divided Germany, the politically independent
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was heading for a bloody breakup. Following years
of ethnic hatred propagated by the media during the 1980s, women’s bodies, along with abortion
rights, became discursively manipulated in the creation of nationalist body politics (Schwartz
and Takševa 2020; Žarkov 2007). The brutal war that erupted in 1991 was fuelled by diverging
political interests and tainted by ethnic cleansing that included mass rape perpetrated by all
warring parties (Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks). Serbian nationalist forces carried out the largest
number of atrocities, particularly against Bosniaks. Part of this strategy was the systematic use
of rape and forced impregnation (Allen 1996; Sharrat 2011). Rape camps were established in
hangars and other buildings (Rajiva and Schwartz 2018) where, according to various estimates,
between 25,000 and 40,000 Bosniak women were imprisoned, tortured, and raped, many of
whom were released only after their pregnancies had progressed beyond the possibility of a safe
abortion.
7
These historical events are explored in Drakulić’s fictionalized account of real-life stories in S:
A Novel About the Balkans. The author chose the novel as a literary form so that readers could
identify more closely with a central character constructed as a composite of narratives by
women and girls who later testified about their own rapes (Kabić 2012). A feature film directed
by Juanita Wilson, based on the novel and entitled As if I Am Not There (following closely the
Croatian title of the novel, Kao da me nema), was released in 2010. Whereas the prospect of
CBOWR hovers ominously in the background of A Woman in Berlin, it is realized front and
centre in S. The first two sentences of the novel read: “The child is lying naked in his cot. He is
stretched out on a sheet, perfectly still, his arms and legs splayed, like someone surrendering”
(Drakulić 1999, 1). The story is told in flashbacks. Like Anonymous, S. is an educated, single,
working woman. Originally from multiethnic Sarajevo, she is a teacher in a small Muslim
village in Bosnia when Serbian soldiers attack, round up the inhabitants and take them to a
camp. Many men and boys are killed, whereas the women and girls are imprisoned. Some,
including S., are placed in a “woman’s room” (8) and selected daily for gang rape, torture, and
beatings. Some disappear from the camp and are presumed dead. Although the context in which
the rapes happen is very different from the one in Berlin, the women in both situations are
locked into a space from which there is no escape. In S., it is the camp, whereas for Anonymous
and her neighbours, it is their apartment building and the occupied city where hiding from the
rapist soldiers is rendered virtually impossible. In either scenario, the women are reduced, as
argued by Holger Pötzsch, drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” to bodies that
become “disposable objects that can be mistreated or killed without legal consequences for the
perpetrator” (Pötzsch 2012, 20). S. believes initially that she will be spared because of her ethnic
Serb mother, but she soon grasps that she is considered Muslim because her father is Bosniak.
Here is clear proof of the overvaluation of paternity; despite the fact that S. self-identifies also
through her maternal lineage, in the eyes of her ethnically divided community, the latter is
rendered irrelevant. Unlike the situation in A Woman in Berlin, where the rapists are from
another country and culture, S. recognizes a few of the Serbian soldiers as former neighbours
7
Some research data indicate that Croatian and Serbian women in Bosnia were also sexually abused and
subjected to forced impregnation (Helms 2013; Stiglmayer 1994).

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who speak her own language, reinforcing the extent of the collapse of civil society during the
Bosnian conflict.
Comparable to Anonymous, S. deliberately seeks out a relationship with a high-ranking
soldier—the camp’s commander—as a safeguard against sexual violation by others. Although
she calls it a form of self-preservation, she, too, remains conflicted about her actions of sexual
barter. Like Anonymous, S. believes she cannot become pregnant because she and the other
women stopped menstruating due to calorie deficiency, torture, and abuse. Yet when the camp
is emptied in a prisoner exchange and she becomes a refugee, first in Zagreb and subsequently
in Stockholm, the Croatian doctor who examines her confirms that not only is she pregnant but
that, despite the abortion policies that were still in place at the time, her pregnancy is too
advanced for a safe abortion. S. feels that the war continues in her womb, which no longer
belongs to her. She develops no connection to the child growing inside her; she does not
consider it her own and refers to it as a burden, a tumour, a disease, a parasite she carries as if
she were “a mere receptacle, temporarily housing it, like a rent-a-womb” (italics in the original)
(145). The paragraph from which this quotation, rendered in italics, is taken is written in first
person. This technique is used in places throughout the narrative, suggesting that Drakulić
incorporated the words of actual survivors. Although the two episodes of war rape thematized
in A Woman in Berlin and in S. are separated historically, temporally, and geographically as
well as being set in their distinctive cultural contexts, the treatment of women in times of conflict
and the consequences they face are very similar.
All S. can think about throughout this unwanted pregnancy is for the child to be stillborn, a
subconscious desire for infanticide. F., one of S.’s roommates at the refugee camp in Zagreb,
kills her newborn by pressing the pillow over the little body. While S. does not see a future “for
a being conceived by force, in hatred” (144), she resists the temptation to do the same, having
“seen so much death that the very thought of it makes her sick” (5). Initially agreeing to an
adoption at the Stockholm hospital where she gives birth, she decides to keep her infant son
after noting his strong resemblance to her presumably murdered sister. By the end of the
narrative, she surmises that only mothers can decide the future of such children, not their absent
rapist fathers. She promises to tell her son that he is “her child, hers alone. That he has no father
– because this is the truth” (199), reinforcing their bond by breastfeeding him. According to
Hashamova (2012), the embrace of these “manic defences” (241) is intended to erase
psychologically the child’s paternity (what the authors of this article call paternal heritage),
theoretically permitting S. to meet the challenges of impossible motherhood. The agency and
resilience she is capable of tapping into despite the trauma haunting her come from the
realization that she, a woman who has survived incredible violence, also has the power to show
her own flesh-and-blood son “that the hate from which his life emerged can be transformed into
love” (Drakulić 1999, 199). While it is difficult for the mother to disentangle her love for her
son from the trauma surrounding his conception, the mother-child bond becomes the means
through which the maternal lineage serves to identify the child.
Abortion Policies in Germany and Former Yugoslavia
In order to better contextualize the choices the women in the two above narratives face, one
ought to understand the respective abortion policies that were in place in Germany and
Yugoslavia at the time. In Germany, it is estimated that between 860,000 and two million

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women may have been raped by members of the Red Army but also by the Western Allies –
American, Canadian, French, and British forces (Gebhardt 2015b, 2019; Grossmann 2007; Lilly
2007; Sander and Johr 1991-92). Despite a ban against “fraternization” with the enemy, sexual
violence as well as consensual relationships and sexual barter were common, and while
marriages in the Soviet zone were not possible, in the American zone, thousands of legal
marriages were contracted (Goedde 1999). Whether through rape, sexual barter, or consensual
romantic relationships—and despite a high rate of abortions—thousands of children were born.
The basis for the German statute regarding abortion originated in the 1851 Prussian Civil Code,
outlawing all forms of abortion; it was adopted into the Imperial Penal Code of the German
Empire in 1871 as Paragraph 218 and remained in effect post-WWI under the Weimar Republic
(Telman 1998). While a constitutional revision in 1926 made limited revisions, permitting
abortions under the strict medical indication of “endangerment to life,” all other rationalizations
of abortions, including advertising of services, remained criminalized until the end of WWII
(Grossmann 1995a, 8). In Nazi Germany, pro-natalist measures encouraged healthy Aryan
German women and men to breed for the Fatherland. Access to sterilization and abortion
services narrowed over time, and occasionally, the death penalty for abortionists was
implemented (Bock 1983; Grossmann 1995a). However, racial hygiene laws not only
interdicted sexual intercourse between so-called Aryan Germans and Jews but encouraged
compulsory sterilization and abortion as well as euthanasia for the mentally and physically
disabled, Jewish, Roma, and mixed-race populations. However, all these measures did not stop
the rape of Jewish, Roma, and Slavic women by German troops (Burds 2009; Hedgepeth and
Saidel 2010; Mühlhäuser 2017).
Pregnancies resulting from sexual contact between Allied soldiers and German women toward
the end and in the immediate aftermath of WWII introduced a “foreign” element into the
German population (Grossmann 1995b, 49). Of particular concern were children fathered by
African Americans, although the same was true for children fathered by the Soviets (Brauerhoch
2015; Stelzl-Marx 2009). Various priorities intersected in the debate over the legalization of
abortion. Women’s organizations called for the distribution of birth control and the introduction
of a social indication into abortion legislation (Grossmann 1995a). Protestant leaders deemed
abortion permissible to prevent the birth of foreign children in Germany, while the Catholic
church remained staunchly opposed to the practice (Schmidt-Harzbach 1984). Access to
abortion varied by region. In Bavaria (which was in the American military occupation zone), it
was not only restricted by the stronghold of the Catholic church but was also forbidden by the
US military government. In August 1945, the Bavarian government legalized abortion under
strict medical necessity. However, by the end of 1946, abortions were only allowed if a rape
could be proven and was reported within a week, but compliance with these logistical
requirements was often unmanageable (Gebhardt 2015b). In the Soviet zone, the situation was
more liberal. In Berlin, as of May 1945, doctors could approve abortion into the late stages of
pregnancy if the woman filled out an affidavit certifying she had been raped by a foreigner.
Women were required to describe their attacker, emphasize his ability to overpower them, and
explain that they tried to resist (Fehrenbach 1998). A Berlin doctor recalled: “women came to
me, and I helped them. Other colleagues did so as well. They weren’t reported, they weren’t
written down. These abortions were done and no one asked any questions” (Schmidt-Harzbach
1984, 60). This echoes the experience of Anonymous and her conversation with the doctor.
Illegal abortions and, especially in rural settings, home remedies remained the most (even if not
the most reliable) accessible option for women seeking to end a pregnancy, far outnumbering

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legal or quasi-legal abortions in all occupational zones. However, objections and legal
restrictions on abortion soon re-emerged (Grossmann 1995a).
Unlike Germany, in Yugoslavia, abortion was legal as per medical indication since 1929
(Kingdom of Yugoslavia). Post-WWII, socialist Yugoslavia expanded this regulation rendering
it available upon request. In 1969, abortion became freely available in the first trimester and
was permissible at any stage of pregnancy related to the endangerment of the woman’s life. Yet
it was the 1974 Constitution that formally enshrined access to contraception and fertility
regulation, making the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia the first state to affirm it was
“a human right to decide freely on childbirth” (Kapor-Stanulović and David 1999, 296-97).
The eruption of the war in Bosnia brought special provocations to established sexual health
norms. Unlike in WWII Germany, forced impregnation and imprisonment past gestational
limits for an abortion were intentional on the part of the perpetrators as a form of ethnic
subjugation that would later be classified as a war crime and a means of genocide (Lee 2017).
The sparse availability of public healthcare within a war zone impacted the ability to terminate
unwanted pregnancies. As in Germany, some women procured their own miscarriages using
traditional medicines (Skjelsbaek 2012). Although the Yugoslav abortion legislation was still
in place, the ongoing conflict presented restricting circumstances for both doctors and patients.
As a result of the war, Bosnian hospitals were frequently at capacity and lacking supplies, thus
often unable to assist the women. Those pregnant women who found their way to medical
facilities may have undergone a journey that took months, ultimately preventing them from
having an abortion due to gestational limits. Drakulić’s novel illustrates this situation. Still,
abortions did take place; statistics for Sarajevo showed that before and after the war, there were
two births for every abortion, whereas, during the war, this ratio was reversed (Disdarević-
Stojkanović 1999), suggesting that most women who were forcibly impregnated sought to end
the pregnancy. The vast majority of women who carried their unwanted pregnancy to term
relinquished the newborns after birth. Post-delivery, they displayed relief noticeably distinct
from prepartum states ranging from emotional numbness to depression and suicidal ideation.
Although the women also experienced other distressing events―detention, displacement, and
the murder of family members―many rejected counselling and kept their rapes, abortions, and
the children conceived as a result of rape a secret (Kozaric-Kovacic et al. 1995). What official
reports often bypass, and what Drakulić’s novel captures on the basis of real-life narratives, is
the phenomenon of infanticide committed against CBOWR when abortion was deliberately
denied or unavailable under these extreme circumstances.
CBOWR in Germany and Bosnia: The Struggle to Affirm Maternal Lineage
The authors of this article agree with Hashamova that the ending of Drakulićʼs novel could be
construed as hopeful and interpret the central character’s acceptance of her newborn son as
coming to terms with her trauma by rejecting the patriarchal premium placed on the child’s
identity and prioritizing the maternal lineage. However, Drakulić herself questioned what the
acceptance of CBOWR might mean for mother and child: “Really, what do you tell such a child
as he or she is growing up? The truth? Imagine the child’s horror” (Drakulić 1999, 8). Within
the context of impossible motherhood, even when the mothers maintain their silence about their
ordeal, it is projected onto the children by their community and ultimately internalized by them,
resulting in the phenomenon that “even if the parent never says a word, traumas may end up on

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the shoulders of subsequent generations” (Močnik 2020, 123). This mechanism of
intergenerational trauma transmission was identified by Aleida Assmann as located in the
transfer of embodied experience within families (quoted in Hirsch 2012) and it has been
observed by researchers specifically in the case of CBOWR (Haberkern 2021).
8
Despite their different historical, temporal, and geographic contexts, the experiences of
CBOWR in Germany and Bosnia show remarkable similarities in terms of the intergenerational
transmission of trauma and, consequently, the strain of erasing psychologically (and ultimately
legally) their paternal heritage at the expense of sole identification with their maternal lineage.
Until recently, in Germany, the truth of CBOWR (and CBOW in general) was not part of
cultural memory. These now elderly adults have begun to break the silence surrounding their
origins mainly as a result of research interest in them, which continues to this day as they are
part of the oldest surviving generation of CBOWR.
9
Barbara Stelzl-Marx states that “Russian
child” or “Russian brat” were common abusive words into the 1960s (Stelzl-Marx 2009, 351).
10
It is, therefore, hardly surprising that members of the Thistleflowers group chose silence well
into their old age; it only began to crack given the socio-political shifts that took place after
1990 with the end of the Cold War era. Particularly with the media coverage of the war in former
Yugoslavia, German psychologists and researchers began to show interest in the remaining
German survivors of sexual violence in WWII opening up a new research field that quickly
began to expand: CBOWR (Mochmann 2017).
The first “Russian child” to go public with his story was Jürgen Schubert in 1999. Born in 1946
in North Rhine-Westphalia in West Germany to a German refugee woman from Silesia, he was
treated as a “war casualty” (Schubert 1999, 72) and labelled the “child of a criminal” (Schubert
1999, 83) carrying the stigma of Germany’s defeat and his mother’s rape by a Soviet officer.
Before his passing in 2017, Schubert joined the Thistleflowers group founded in 2014 by
Winfried Behlau. Group members view themselves as hardy thistle flowers, symbolizing both
trauma and resilience. Their goal is to raise public awareness of their and other CBOWR’s
“shadow children” existence (Behlau 2015, 6). In his memoir, Schubert explicitly stated that his
motivation to go public with his story was rooted in his desire to help war children of younger
generations, specifically those born as a result of the war in Bosnia, so that “they don’t have to
go through the same experiences” (Schubert 1999, 80). Unlike Schubert, Behlau, and the
younger generation of the Bosnian CBOWR, many of the Thistleflowers members wish to retain
their anonymity and do not use their full names, which reflects their decades-long
stigmatization.
8
Lisa Haberkern lists various terms that are used to refer to trauma transmission across generations (secondary
traumatization, intergenerational transmission, transgenerational transmission etc.). As the authors of this article
only looked at the trauma transmission between mother and child, the term intergenerational transmission is more
appropriate than transgenerational transmission, which implies several generations.
9
The recent four-year project EuroWARCHILD launched in Oslo in 2022 is seeking the participation of both
German (representing the oldest generation) and Bosnian CBOW (including CBOWR), in addition to a third,
youngest generation of children fathered in conflict situations – the children fathered by European fighters of ISIS.
See University of Oslo. “EuroWARCHILD.” Accessed March 10, 2023.
https://www.stk.uio.no/english/research/projects/eurowarchild./
10
Unless otherwise specified, all translations from German and Bosnian sources are by Schwartz.

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In 2015, Behlau edited a volume by the same name as the group containing members’ individual
life narratives. It was published in German and translated into English that same year. In this
publication and in various interviews, Behlau made public that he was conceived as a result of
a Russian soldier’s rape of his mother and, like Schubert, was referred to as a “war casualty” in
his birth certificate: “that was the same as if a house had collapsed somewhere and a damage
had arisen, I was now just like that property damage” (Interview with Behlau 2016). For the
group’s members, in addition to raising public awareness about their and other CBOWR’s
existence, the process of communicating and composing their life narratives has opened up a
space for working through their traumatic memories. Behlau, who had a difficult relationship
with his mother during his youth, stated, “And only since I have now, so to speak, opened
up…there is something that fell off, so that I think I’ve totally changed my way of dealing with
people” (Interview with Behlau 2016). Unlike Behlau, Ulrike prefers to use her first name only.
She was a child given up for adoption at age three and raised by a loving couple. Like Behlau,
Ulrike emphasizes how speaking and writing about her past has helped her come to terms with
her conflicted feelings about her identity: “And since 2007, I have written down about thirty
pages of my biography. I have also been writing a diary for many, many years. And I would say
that writing helped me a lot to express my feelings” (Interview with Ulrike 2017).
The importance of speaking up and shaking off trauma and stigma is thus a process of
empowerment and is also emphasized by CBOWR in Bosnia. These children were labelled
“Chetnik bastards,” “malignant cells of cancer,” and “mistakes of war” (“Rede vor der UN”
2019). Now young adults, aided by the growing national and international media and research
interest in CBOWR, they began organizing at a far earlier age than their German counterparts
and founded the NGO Zaboravljena djeca rata – Forgotten Children of War in 2018 with the
assistance of Bosnian psychotherapist Amra Delić. It brings together Bosnian CBOWR and
CBOW, the latter including those fathered by peacekeepers, born of forced marriages between
members of hostile armies and children of women trafficked in conflict zones (Begagić 2018).
They have led region-wide campaigns “advocating for rights for the children of war and women
survivors of all ethnic groups” (Schwartz and Takševa 2020, 135). Ajna Jusić, a psychologist,
feminist, and a young adult born of rape, serves as the president of the group (Anadolija 2018;
UN Women 2019). Her story, and that of her mother, inspired the internationally acclaimed
2006 Bosnian film Grbavica (directed by Jasmila Žbanić). The film was instrumental not only
in breaking the silence over the fate of the Bosnian women and CBOWR but also in leading to
a long overdue acknowledgement of these mothers as civilian victims of war. As stated by Jusić,
until recently, the Bosnian CBOWR did not receive adequate recognition or state support (UN
Women 2019). Aided by the activism of Forgotten Children of War, a new law recognizing
these children as civilian victims of war was adopted in July 2022 in the Brčko district in Bosnia
and Herzegovina. Jusić expressed her hope that the law would soon be applied in the entire
Bosnian Federation as well as in the Republika Srpska (Kurt 2022).
11
11
The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement divided Bosnia and Herzegovina, formerly a republic within Yugoslavia,
into the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, as well as the small Brčko District
belonging to both entities.

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Many CBOWR may never find out the truth about their violent conception. In Germany,
mothers remained silent about their children’s paternity whether they had been raped or engaged
in a romantic liaison. Behlau was told the truth of his paternity by his mother as a teenager,
although he had already had doubts about his birth certificate (Interview with Behlau 2016).
Renate heard about her mother’s rape as an adult after her mother had passed away. She recalls
being told by a family friend that “my mother had been raped by a Mongolian and that I was
the child of this rape. The food practically got stuck in my throat when I heard that; it was a
shock which burdens me to this day” (Interview with Renate 2016). Her shock not only
reverberates with the sexual violence done to her mother but also with the powerful remnants
of Nazi racial ideology. Like Renate, Ulrike discovered the truth about her biological origins as
an adult following her adoptive parents’ death. She finally gained access to birth documents that
she used to trace her biological mother, who was still alive at that time (Interview with Ulrike
2017).
One of the most poignant aspects of the narratives of many CBOWR is their acknowledgement
that they were not supposed to be born, echoing the previous findings that in the last phases of
the war in Germany, abortions were widespread. Indeed, some Thistleflowers members
recognized that their mothers wanted to abort them. Schubert suggests that his mother took up
with a Soviet officer who was an Orthodox Jew, perhaps engaging in sexual barter. Since she
claimed she had been raped, she received permission to have a legal abortion but either decided
not to proceed with it or the abortion was botched. She abandoned her son under family pressure,
and he grew up in an orphanage. Unlike Schubert, Behlau grew up with his birth mother, who
decided to keep her unwanted “Russian brat” but wanted to “smack [him] against the wall.”
Previously, she had tried various home remedies to terminate her pregnancy (Interview with
Behlau 2016). Renate tells a similar story about her mother: “My mother wanted to abort [me],
but that failed. When she was pregnant with me in the eighth month, she was sent in a cattle
wagon to an internment camp in Saxony-Anhalt. And I am certain, had I been born in the camp,
I wouldn’t be here today” (Interview with Renate 2016). How could Renate be so certain about
her mother’s intention to abort or possibly commit infanticide? Renate adds that her mother had
endured other pregnancies before her birth but that she was “the only surviving child and I
assume that they were killed.” Listening with the third ear, the interviewer questioned whether
her siblings were killed in the war. Renate replied, “No no no. My mother was never married.
Everything happened in these three years in the camp. All Russian children, all Russian
children” (Interview with Renate 2016). The gaps in Renate’s narrative are telling. She does not
directly attribute the death of her siblings to abortion or infanticide. Instead, she accepts that
they were all fathered out of wedlock by Russians―in all likelihood by rape―during her
mother’s internment in East Prussia. Yet the narrative omits details that are too painful or
uncomfortable to express, putting Renate’s fragile survival into perspective.
The violent conception of CBOWR and the prospect of abortion or infanticide have a serious
impact on maternal bonding, reinforcing the impossibility of impossible motherhood. The
German CBOWR narratives reflect what psychological research has demonstrated regarding
“poor mother-child attachment” between mothers who survived sexual violence in conflict and
their CBOWR (Roupetz, Delic, and Glaesmer 2021, 115), illustrating one of the most difficult
aspects of impossible motherhood. Schubert’s childhood and adolescence were characterized
by maternal rejection, disappointment, and institutionalization – a fate shared by many
CBOWR. Schubert was often kept drugged at the orphanage while Behlau and Renate, growing
up with birth mothers who remained single, report being beaten with leather belts, which,

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although not an uncommon method of disciplining a child in post-war Germany, devolved into
abuse. Behlau’s mother often slapped him hard, asserting that she had to “beat the bad character
out of the child”; Behlau contemplated, “How could the child be of good or at least acceptable
character with a criminal for a father?” (Behlau 2015, 79). The authors of this article could also
interpret this as an attempt of the mother to both physically and metaphorically erase her son’s
paternity lineage. Renate shared similar memories of physical abuse: “I had to lean over the
stool, expose my bottom and then she had a leather strap, and she hit me green and blue…Yes,
and then I was always told that I am nothing, I am no good, and I will never become anything”
(Interview with Renate 2016). It took both Behlau and Renate decades to forgive their mothers
and realize, as expressed in the interviews, that they were likely suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder, exacerbated by the economic hardship of the post-war years.
Unlike the recent positive developments in Bosnia, women raped by the Allies did not receive
any state compensation in Germany, neither for their violation nor for their CBOWR, an
omission never rectified. According to Gebhardt, even though a 1955 legislation made federal
funds available for German CBOWR, given the virtually impossible requirement to have
witnesses of the rape testify, most applications were turned down (Gebhardt 2015a). Moreover,
the women were slandered on sexual grounds. Behlau recorded that when his mother went
repeatedly to a welfare office to beg for financial aid, she had to “listen to ignorant comments
and insults such as ‘Must have had fun back then…’” (Behlau 2015, 85). This intersection of
sexism, humiliation, stigmatization, and economic hardship intensified the weight of impossible
motherhood for both mothers and children. For Behlau, the inclusion of more positive memories
about some nurturing aspects of his relationship with his mother only became possible thanks
to his activism, writing, and work with researchers following his mother’s passing in 2017
(Behlau 2018).
Bosnian CBOWR report similarly conflicted feelings towards their birth mothers. Lejla Damon
was born to a Bosniak mother named Safa on Christmas Day in 1992. Damon’s story has
become an international media item when she was adopted, with Safa’s consent, by a BBC
journalist couple who raised her in Britain. In a 2018 radio interview in Ottawa, Damon
describes why her mother rejected her, raising the threat of infanticide: “I reminded her of all
the men that had raped her. I was a constant reminder that if she held me, that she would strangle
me” (Lofaro 2018). Safa’s reaction is reminiscent of S. in Drakulić’s novel. Throughout her
unwanted pregnancy, S. is also unable to separate her child’s existence and identity from the
violence that had led to its conception. Psychologists described this reaction to CBOWR as the
identification of the child with the perpetrator of the violent act, which leads to a reliving of the
trauma and, ultimately, rejection of the child – something S., unlike Safa, eventually overcame
(Roupetz, Delic, and Glaesmer 2021). Damon grew up in London and became an anti-war
activist (N1 Sarajevo 2018). Her adoptive parents did not hide the truth of her origins from her.
She first visited Bosnia and met Safa in 2016, remaining in contact with her and her half-sister
born after the war. Damon came to appreciate why her mother, who suffers from multiple health
issues mainly as a result of rape, gave her up for adoption: “As much as I suppose she hated me
and she wanted to get rid of me, she also agreed for me to be adopted, so it was kind of one of
those things where it is a second chance…It’s taken a while for me to see that as a positive
without it being all about rejection” (Lofaro 2018). With the help of loving and supportive
adoptive parents, Damon has come to understand that for her deeply traumatized birth mother,
mothering a child of rape was indeed impossible. This recognition has allowed Damon to accept
her birth mother and embrace her biological maternal lineage.

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Alen Muhić, another member of Forgotten Children of War, was also born to a Bosniak woman
who was raped. She abandoned her baby in a Goražde hospital, where he was soon adopted by
a Bosniak hospital worker and his wife. Muhić learned the truth about his origins when a
schoolmate threw the label “Chetnik bastard” at him. Like Damon, Muhić believes that being
adopted into a loving family gave him a chance at a better life, although he grapples with his
paternal heritage: “The biggest war for me is the one I fight with myself…I was not born from
love; I was born from hate” (Mainichi 2018). His concern echoes S.’s fear about her son’s future
in Drakulić’s novel because he, too, was conceived from hate. Muhić has since met his birth
mother, who now lives in the USA and has a new family. Her terrible ordeal, however, haunts
her to this day (Sullivan 2021). Today, Muhić is happily married, a proud father, and a nurse at
the same hospital where he was born. In October 2019, he gave a powerful speech at the UN on
behalf of Bosnian CBOWR, insisting that they “do not want to be portrayed falsely as
‘malignant cells of cancer’ that are spreading the seeds of hatred” and that they “are not the
mistakes of war but only human beings and should be treated as such” (“Rede vor der UN”
2019). Muhić implicitly formulates the rejection of the CBOWR’s paternal heritage as, in a
patriarchal society, it continues to tie ethnic identity to the violent legacy of war and interethnic
strife, putting continuous roadblocks to peaceful cohabitation. Allowing CBOWR to embrace
their maternal lineage is part of establishing lasting peace in a community still haunted by its
violent past.
Unlike the women who birthed Damon and Muhić and gave them up for adoption, Jusić’s
mother, Sabina Bašić, decided to keep her. In the film Grbavica, based on the story of Bašić
and her daughter, a Bosniak woman’s maternal ambivalence toward the child conceived through
rape in a camp is poignantly expressed as she moves from wanting an abortion to giving up and
eventually breastfeeding her newborn, echoing the experience of S.:
I wanted to kill her. I pounded my stomach with my fists to make her fall out of
me. It was no use. My belly grew. Even then they [the rapists] came. In twos,
threes, every day. In the hospital, after I gave birth, I said: ‘I don’t want her.
Take her away.’ I heard her crying. I heard her through the walls. The next day
my milk started flowing. I said: ‘OK, I’ll feed her, but only once!’…And when
they brought her, when I took her in my arms, she was so tiny. And she was so
beautiful. I had already forgotten that there was anything beautiful in this world.
(Žbanić 2006)
12
Hashamova suggests that Grbavica “takes up where Drakulić’s novel leaves off” some fourteen
years later but underlines a significant divergence between S. and the enacted story of real-life
Bašić (Hashamova 2012, 241). As a single mother, S. is able to prioritize her infant son’s
maternal lineage over his paternal heritage in relative security in peaceful, far-away Sweden.
Conversely, in the film, single mother Esma (portraying Bašić) must raise her daughter in the
very same community that was destroyed by war, masking her daughter’s paternal heritage with
lies about a hero Bosniak father, the impossibility of her impossible motherhood on full display
when she finally tells her adolescent daughter: “You’re the bastard of a Chetnik” (quoted in
Hashamova 2012, 243).
12
On the difficulties and ambivalent attitudes in mothering children born of rape see Lee and Mochmann 2015,
35; Takševa 2017.

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Once fifteen-year-old Jusić encountered the truth about her paternity, she struggled for months,
thinking that her mother must hate her as a constant reminder of her traumatic experience
(NOVA TV 2018). What helped mother and daughter come to terms with their relationship was
the therapy they received at Medica Zenica, an NGO founded in Bosnia by Swiss gynecologist
Monika Hauser – the founder of medica mondiale. Unlike her daughter, Bašić has only recently
been able to speak publicly about the complexities of mothering a CBOWR, encouraged by her
daughter’s activism, which she believes will contribute to raising awareness about both the fate
of the children and the fate of women raped in the war. She admits that there were trying periods
when she was unable to look at her daughter partly because of her physical resemblance to her
rapist father: “When she was three, she had to shave off her eyebrows because I couldn’t look
at her. There were a thousand painful situations. But when all that was over, she became my
greatest support” (Fena 2019). The mother still has doubts about whether life would have been
better for her daughter had she given her up for adoption, but today, they both affirm their strong
bond (Kožul 2020).
13
Bašić and Jusić’s story illustrates the stage of acceptance of CBOWR as
identified by psychologists, namely, “identification of the child as an independent human being,
leading to acceptance of the maternal role and taking responsibility for a biographical
turnaround” (Roupetz, Delic, and Glaesmer 2021, 116). More recently, on the Facebook page
of Forgotten Children of War, Jusić powerfully expressed her self-identification through her
maternal lineage stating, “My identity is ‘I am my mother’s child’ and this is something
everybody has to accept. We are not, and never will be children of the enemy” (Zaboravljena
2022). Her words echo those of Muhić spoken at the UN.
It has taken the Thistleflowers children seventy years to come to terms with their stigmatized
identity. In his contribution to the Thistleflowers volume, Schubert shakes off the long-held and
externally imposed negative labels he had to live with most of his life by stating, “I am a gift of
the Allies” (italics in the original) (Schubert 1999, 39). For some Bosniak CBOWR, like Jusić,
Muhić, and Damon, this process has taken considerably less time due to the heightened global
awareness of sexual violence in conflict zones, in addition to the availability of counselling
services in Bosnia. There was no such assistance for the German CBOWR, and many of them
decided or were able to access those services only in later adulthood. In addition, technological
developments such as the Internet have also facilitated the organizing and media outreach of
the Bosnian CBOWR at a much younger age. What is common to both groups is that they and
their mothers were rejected by their respective ethnic and national communities and
discriminated against when it came to social benefits. The Bosnian CBOWR were stigmatized
and discriminated against by the state in relation to children whose fathers died in the war as
putative heroes. Until recently, they had problems with legal documents that required the
inclusion of the father’s name. It is an injustice that the group Forgotten Children of War has
successfully fought to rectify. Since 2021, several municipalities in Bosnia have introduced new
forms that require the name of one parent instead of the name of the father alone, thus breaking
with long-held patriarchal traditions that favour paternal heritage over maternal lineage
(Arnautović 2021) and leading to the legal acceptance of the latter.
13
In her essay based on a Bosnian mother-daughter story, Tatjana Takševa is interested specifically in the
investigation of empowered motherhood through an analysis of the lived experiences of women mothering
CBOWR, a perspective that goes beyond the explorations of the present article (Takševa 2019).

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Conclusion
This article has used two examples of twentieth-century armed conflicts in Europe―Germany
toward the end of WWII and Bosnia in the 1990s―to illustrate, through a feminist narrative
analysis of selected published and unpublished narratives and interview data, the
intergenerational impact of rape in war. With a focus on unwanted pregnancy, abortion, and
CBOWR, the authors introduced the terms “maternal lineage” and “paternal heritage,”
suggesting that the recognition of the former constitutes a feminist reconceptualization of the
identity of CBOWR and a potential solution to the conflicts of impossible motherhood. The
analysis has demonstrated that through the validation of maternal lineage, the children’s
inclusion into their mothers’ ethnic and national community is enabled, and consequently, the
stigmatization they both experience because of the overvaluation of the paternal heritage of
CBOWR can be overcome. While the selected narratives highlight the violence faced by both
the women and CBOWR, they also demonstrate their resilience and display evidence of post-
traumatic growth. Tedeschi and Calhoun describe post-traumatic growth in people who
survived traumatic situations as a “perception of inner strength” and a “changed philosophy of
life” (Tedeschi and Calhoun qtd. in Szymanski and Rosenfeld 2014, 266) without taking away
from the pain and suffering that marked their lives.
Although there are substantial numbers of CBOWR in Germany and Bosnia, to date, only a
handful of them have been willing to go public, making it all the more important to acknowledge
the stories through which they express their conflicted ethnic and national identities but also
their own agency. Behlau’s message to his younger Bosnian counterparts is “Speak up and do
not feel guilty. And say, you are strong; it happened to your mother, but you are innocent and
do not have to pay for what your father has done” (Interview with Behlau 2016). The Bosnian
CBOWR who broke their silence did so at a much younger age than their German counterparts
from whose experiences they are able to learn. Their greater self-confidence, made possible by
greater international awareness about CBOWR and CBOW, is reflected also in the fact that
they, unlike many of the German CBOWR, are willing to be identified by their full names.
While millions of women continue to experience sexual violence in conflict zones and suffer
from its consequences (Porter 2018; Taylor 2022), and thousands of children continue to be
born as a result, it is important to note that the very existence of CBOWR and CBOW defies
not only myths of ethnically homogenous nationhood but also the destructive nature of wars
that fractures communities and sows animosity. Saskia Mitreuter sees in CBOW not a challenge
for societies but a chance towards peace building internationally as they can help to bridge
differences (Mitreuter 2021). In his speech at the UN, Muhić broadcast a similar message on
behalf of Bosnian CBOWR stating, “I don’t hate anyone. Hate destroys and that’s why I have
chosen love. It builds bridges and instils hope. Love is more powerful than hate because love
can end violence!” (“Rede vor der UN” 2019). His words echo the trajectory of S. in Drakulić’s
novel in accepting her child born of rape as a triumph of love over death, violence, hatred, and
destruction.
Silke Satjukow and Rainer Gries call CBOW “children of the future” (Satjukow and Gries 2015,
364). With new generations of CBOWR growing up and being conceived (Ciobanu 2022), it is
all the more important to learn from the narratives of the two generations juxtaposed in this
article. German and Bosnian CBOWR are meant to encourage other children born under similar
circumstances and their mothers to break their silence and share their stories to continue to raise
awareness about the complex realities of armed conflict and its aftermath, fighting against

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sexual and other forms of violence, stigmatization, ethnic division lines, and hatred in both
wartime and peacetime.

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ISSN 2562-8429
Published by the Centre for European Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Available online at: https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.php/CJERS/index
The Canadian Journal of European and Russian Studies (CJERS – formerly Review of European
and Russian Affairs) is an open-access electronic academic peer-reviewed journal: articles are
subject to double-blind peer-review. Topics relate to the European Union, its Member States,
the former Soviet Union, and Central and Eastern Europe. The journal is published by the Centre
for European Studies, an associated unit of the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian
Studies at Carleton University.
CJERS aims to provide an accessible forum for the promotion and dissemination of high quality
research and scholarship.
Contact:
Carleton University
The Centre for European Studies
1103 Dunton Tower
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6
Canada
E-mail: CJERS@carleton.ca
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This Working Paper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No
Derivs 4.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Articles appearing in this publication may be freely quoted and reproduced, provided the source
is acknowledged. No use of this publication may be made for resale or other commercial
purposes.
ISSN: 2562-8429
© 2019 The Author(s)