German Boys' Berets: Regional Trends


Figure 1.--Here we see a variety of dress worn by four Stuttgart boys. The snapshot was taken phed in in 1947 (a couple of years after World War II ended). Notice that they wear berets, which became popular in Germany as well as in France. Two of the boys wear long trousers, one of them with loose rather baggy garments that look almost like sweat pants. One boy wears short trousers with knee socks. A third boy wears shorts with black long stockings but with ankle socks over them. No doubt clothing was scarce and hard to come by in the years immediately after the war. Boys probably wore whatever they could find or their parents could afford, often relying perhaps on hand-me-downs. They might be dressed for school since boys in secondary school didn't usually wear uniforms. It looks as though the picture had been taken on a rather bleak day.

We suspect that the popularity of berets may have varied regionally in Germany. We believe that they were most popular in the Rhineland, close to France. We have noted, however, snapshots of Germany boys wearing beret throughout the coutry. Here we see boys from Stuttgart wearing berets after World War II. Stutgart is in the middle of southern Grmany. Formal portraits are less common. The NAZIs when they seized Alsace-Loraine in World War II baned the beret as part of a campaign to wipe out French influence. This included banning the French language. Interestingly, the NAZIs did not ban the beret in the Reich proper, only in Alsace-Loraine. We do not yet, however, have any detailed regional information on the wearing of berets in Germany. Hopefully our German readers will provide us some insight. A HBC reader tell us as a boy in Stuttgart during the early 1940s that he also wore berets.









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Created: 8:59 PM 11/27/2007
Last updated: 7:37 AM 11/30/2007