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Abstract
Past research has well established that the personal name a woman carries can have a significant impact upon the way she is perceived by her surrounding environment. The power of this impact may be significantly increased during periods of sociopolitical unrest. Using the techniques of corpus linguistics, this paper traces diachronic variations in the twenty most popular girls' names chosen by German parents between 1934 and 1950. To supplement this empirical analysis, historical information is provided on onomastic legislation which not only affected societal preferences in female names, but also the individual lives of the women who carried them.