The war seemed to have destroyed all false hopes. From the very beginning, Jews felt joined with other Germans in the war efforts and uplifted by the promise of total brotherhood, as announced by Kaiser Wilhelm II in the streets of Berlin. But later on, as the war became a rather hopeless trench war, little remained of this sense of togetherness. The Jews felt the atmospheric change in the return of antisemitism. Individuals experienced it directly in their various army units and the community as a whole was finally shocked and irritated by the decision to collect “Jewish Statistics,” measuring their presumably real part in defending the Fatherland, , in October 1916. Later on, Jews were overwhelmed, together with others, by more threatening dangers. After briefly telling the life-story of Albert Ballin, the great ship-owner from Hamburg, a “Kaiser-Jew,” and the way he experienced the lost war, the end of the empire, and the approaching revolution, the chapter moves on to tell of the great hopes entertained by other, less prosperous Jews, who experienced the end of the old order and the imminent establishment of a new republic in a far more positive light.

In this chapter, the women narrate experiences of birth and the early (6–8) weeks of first-time mothering/motherhood. In contrast to antenatal anticipation, the visceral, physical and embodied changes, which accompany birth and early mothering, provide new narrative vantage points. But in the earlier motherhood study, some women found it hard to voice their experiences of new motherhood at this point, only later revealing experiences they felt had run counter to idealised versions of motherhood. But in the contemporary study, the increased number of unexpectedly interventionist births (which did not go to ‘plan’), together with more readily available 24/7 digital access to other mothers, provided new modes of collective support. However, a key question arises in the contemporary study, in which first-time motherhood also occurs at an older age and where cascading intervention is experienced during labour and birth. This concerns how preparations in the antenatal period correspond to birth outcomes that are statistically more likely to include surgical intervention and emergency C-sections. A disjunction between antenatal preparation and labour and birth demands further attention, which is returned to in a later chapter.