The Family in Modern Germany

Lisa Pine

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350253131
• eBook ISBN: 9781350047723
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This cutting-edge edited collection examines the impact of political and social change upon the modern German family. By analysing different family structures, gender roles, social class aspects and children's socialization, The Family in Modern Germany provides a comprehensive and well-balanced overview of how different political systems have shaped modern conceptualizations of the family, from the bourgeois family ideal right up to recent trends like cohabitation and same-sex couples. Beginning with an overview of the 19th-century family, each chapter goes on to examine changes in family type, size and structure across the different decades of the 20th century, with a focus on the relationship between the family and the state, as well as the impact of family policies and laws on the German family. Lisa Pine and her expert team of contributors draw on a wealth of primary sources, including legal documents, diaries, letters and interviews, and the most up-to-date secondary literature to shed new light on the continuities and changes in the history of the family in modern and contemporary Germany. This book is a fantastic resource for scholars, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates studying modern German history, sociology and social policy.

1

The family in Imperial Germany

Gunilla Budde

Introduction: The family becomes a topic of discussion

The word ‘family’ entered the German vocabulary ‘with a vengeance’, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm noted in the early nineteenth century. ‘Compound words’ became multisyllabic and their ‘inexhaustible array’ showed ‘how deeply the word has taken root among us’.¹ Their linguistic research beginning in 1838 yielded ninety compounds in all, ranging from Familien-Abenteuer (family adventure) and Familien-Glück (family happiness) to Familien-Zwist (family feud). Just as quickly as the new word spread, the family became omnipresent as a topic of contemporary discourse. This was all the truer in Imperial Germany, when social analyses flourished and crisis scenarios came to dominate them. People realised that something was happening to the family as an institution; the family became part of the historical process and thus dynamic and subject to evolution. In other words, it acquired its history as a natural entity, a history that has been written over and over since the mid-nineteenth century. This historicity that the discourses now accorded the family was also reflected in other forms. Eighteenth-century German plays had revolved around the family. Tragedies such as Kabale und Liebe, Emilia Galotti and Miss Sara Simpson presented the family as a fragile, imperilled and damaged institution. But in the less dramatic political literature, a romantically glorified image of the family dominated. This was also the case in Carl Rotteck’s and Carl Welcker’s well known Staats-Lexikon, where the article on the family calls it ‘the foundation of all noble human and civil life, all human and civil happiness’.²

To what extent did family realities in Imperial Germany live up to this ideal? What were the prevalent ideal notions of the family, where were they best realised, and where did ideal and reality diverge most widely? What changes became evident in Imperial Germany in contrast to the first half of the century? What changes became apparent after the turn of the century?

The bourgeois family: Ideal and reality

If the family became a topic of conversational culture, it was above all members of the German upper middle classes who led the discussion. More influentially than anywhere else in Europe, comparative studies have shown, men and women of the German upper middle classes, although numerically a minority of around 5 per cent, put their stamp on their society.³ At the beginning of the century, the educated bourgeoisie, and not least members of the higher civil service, led the way. Their main focus was the nobility, a social caste from which they wished to distance themselves in lifestyle and life plans. With self-confidence, the bourgeoisie as a new class set its own values against aristocratic ones. It conceptualised its own bourgeois culture in which, always with an eye to the aristocracy as a contrasting backdrop, achievement was opposed to birth, moderation to extravagance, and tolerance to narrow-mindedness.

The heart of this bourgeois culture was a specific ideal of the family. In this ideal, the family was supposed to be founded on affinity and held together by love. It was conceived of largely as a two-generation nuclear family composed of father, mother and children, and clearly sealed off from the world of profession and work. Its chief task was to raise children according to their peculiarities and needs and to cultivate a clear gender-specific division of labour, with the adequate income of the husband and father and the work of maids providing the necessary financial means and leisure.

Such ideas were expressed in a variety of normative writings, and their realisation was, by and large, what the bourgeoisie aimed to achieve. And not only the bourgeoisie; other social strata considered the bourgeois family ideal worth striving for, even if they frequently lacked the material means to do so consistently. On the one hand, the family suffered a decisive loss of traditional functions through the separation of work and family life. It evolved from a sphere of production to one of pure reproduction and recreation. The world of work moved more or less away from the domestic four walls, but in any case out of the immediate sight of women and children. On the other hand, the family attained a higher conceptual value, since it was projected as a harmonious refuge from the demanding outside world.

The division of tasks within the family, which assigned middle-class men the professional world outside the family and women the family sphere, was declared to correspond to ‘innate’ gender character and was thus dubbed ‘natural’. Contemporary lexicon articles did their part to provide this model with a normative foundation. They described women as passive, conservative, emotional, irrational, adaptable, fickle, industrious and modest, and men as active, independent, brave, rational, energetic, future-oriented and farsighted. Such a polar gender order not only solidified inequalities, but also rooted them in a system of domination and subordination. Decisions were made by the husband and father, and all family members were subject to his absolute authority.⁴

But how did the idea of female subordination fit with that of equal opportunities and the freedom of all to develop their potential – without regard to birth, and hence also to sex? In any case, even the masterminds of the utopian programme of civil society were troubled by this inconsistency of argumentation, and diligently sought justifications. In so doing, they used some rather serpentine arguments. According to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) in his journal Adrastea, for instance, since women perpetually lived in the ‘paradise’ of ‘domestic society’ and were thus mistresses of the space of the ‘purely human’ – unlike middle-class men, who were out bustling in the professional world – they had no need for compensation in the guise of the public sphere. Accordingly, middle-class women had already found their ‘destiny’ as ‘educators of humanity’, while middle-class men had to seek their own forms and institutions outside the family in the process of finding themselves and their proper personality.

Man and woman were supposed to come together in marriage. In the bourgeois view, marriage as a life-long bond was not an institution dedicated to securing political and economic authority, such as it continued to be instrumentalised into the nineteenth century by the European nobility, with its orientation towards class privilege and outward conventions. Instead, it was an emotional relationship between two partners, free of all material interests. Love and nothing but love was to be the criterion for choosing a partner. This is what magazines, poems and novels taught the men and women of the upper middle classes. These, in turn, cultivated the language of love in bridal letters. The letter culture, which began to flourish in the eighteenth century, continued in the nineteenth century.⁵ The Romantic writers, in particular, engaged in a war of words in opposition to marriages of convenience and in favour of love matches. In his 1796 work on natural law, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) declared marriage to be a matter of the heart: ‘For this reason the state need not pass laws governing the relationship between the two spouses, for their entire relationship is not juridical, but a natural and moral relation of the heart. The two are one soul.’⁶

But even if middle-class men and especially women read these texts with teary eyes, few of them actually took to heart the ideals praised therein. The bourgeois, naturally unspoken motto was, rather, marriage equals love plus reason. And even love here did not refer to a ‘romantic love’ that threw all conventions overboard, but to a well-tempered, ‘rational’ affection. For even when love was invoked, there were often practical considerations as well. Few middle-class women or men would have dreamt of tying the knot solely out of mutual affection. Family considerations carried a great deal of weight. Even in the middle classes, the right of parents to have a say in their children’s marriages long went uncontested. Among the first and most common questions that middle-class fathers asked their potential sons-in-law related to the state of their finances and their professional prospects. Fathers not infrequently made detailed enquiries into the financial resources of their daughters’ prospective spouses. For one thing was clear: the husband’s secure professional existence was an essential prerequisite for maintaining bourgeois status. This was even truer of the economic bourgeoisie, which became stronger in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the pace of industrialisation quickened with the establishment of the German Empire, entrepreneurs, bankers and managers became ever more prominent as a segment of the bourgeoisie. If there was a solid family business in the background, practical considerations played a very open role alongside fondness. Marrying into a ‘good family’ was deemed a welcome opportunity to expand the circle of those with whom one not only did business, but also interacted privately. Particularly in the early years of industrialisation, which in Germany only truly began after 1850, ‘systematic intermarriage’ was a common means of strengthening and cementing ties between enterprises through family relationships. Apart from maximising business and social possibilities, the methodical founding of families also served to minimise possible risks. If business transactions took place in the framework of a widely ramified kinship circle, the actors operated within a network of mutual trust, which could help to reduce the density of contractual regulations and lower the costs of acquiring reliable information and supervising business relationships.⁷

The success of this reconciliation of the love match ideal with such economic criteria was connected with the places where future spouses usually met. Marriage markets filtered marriage circles. Thus the intended mainly met at family festivities, dinner parties, musicals and theatre premieres, the newly fashionable summer resorts and spa visits or on the tennis court or ice rink. Intimacy had to be demonstrated with polished manners, and wives and daughters also displayed the family’s wealth with their gowns and jewellery. But regardless of whether young people met on the dance floor or the ice, on the spa promenade or the tennis court, all of the sites of growing acquaintance listed here kept social circles small. That true affection between individuals could grow out of such a limited range of choices was a result not least of this very fact. The apparently spontaneous elective affinities that emerged were based on shared preferences and notions of taste, a tableau of qualities that were deemed attractive, a similar habitus. Viewed from this perspective, the highly endogamous marriage circles in the German bourgeoisie are hardly surprising; choices of marriage partner rarely breached the boundaries of the upper middle class.

The culmination of the courtship and engagement phase was a glittering wedding party, traditionally at the expense of the father of the bride. One such father, Wilhelm Welber, a Berlin banker, noted in his house chronicle in 1895:

The eve-of-the-wedding party was on Monday, the 6th of May, at our home. It was perfectly delightful, with splendid weather and we used the garden. Some 50 persons were present. The performances were printed as mementoes. The wedding was on Wednesday, the 8th of May. The civil ceremony in Steglitz, the church wedding in Berlin at the new church of our old friend, Pastor Richter from Mariendorf. The banquet was held in Berlin at the “English House”, Mohrenstraße 49, elegant and excellent. It was attended by 85 persons and cost 2575 marks.⁸

‘The newlyweds departed at 10 o’clock’, reads the last entry; the honeymoon had become a common practice. As to the destinations of honeymoons, certain preferences emerged that accentuate the bourgeois complexion of these tours d’amour. A favourite locale was Italy, where the couple could spend their first longer period of time alone in the shadow of art and architecture, and thus on familiar terrain. During these journeys, the spouses also spent their first night together. Many young middle-class women were completely unprepared for their husbands’ incompr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of abbreviations and terms
• Introduction
• 1 The family in Imperial Germany
• 2 Rejuvenating the family: The struggle between tradition and modernity in Weimar Germany
• 3 ‘The germ cell of the nation’: The family in the Third Reich
• 4 Post-war paternalism and modern mothers: Changing families in 1950s West Germany
• 5 Continuities and ruptures: Women’s agency and the West German family, 1960s–1980s
• 6 Vanguard of the working mother: The East German family between change and continuity
• 7 German family policy since reunification
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index
• Copyright