The German Family (Routledge Revivals)

Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany

Richard J. Evans, W. R. Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138843790
• eBook ISBN: 9781317550228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This book surveys the history of the German family in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributions deal with the influence of industrialisation on family life in town and country, with rural families and communities under the impact of social and economic change, and with the role and influence of the family in the lives of men and women in the newly-emerged working class.

Research on the history of the family had so far, at the point of this book's publication in 1981, concentrated on England and France; this book adds an important comparative dimension by extending the discussion into Central Europe and bringing fresh evidence and interpretation to bear on the wider debate about the effects of industrialisation on family structure and family life as a whole. The authors approach the subject from a variety of perspectives, including social anthropology, oral history, economic history and feminist studies.

This book is ideal for students of history, particularly the history of Germany.

1	THE GERMAN FAMILY: A CRITICAL SURVEY OF THE CURRENT STATE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH
	Robert Lee

I

The crisis of history as an academic discipline has been voiced on innumerable occasions. History, it has been claimed, ‘fails to fulfil its social function – in government, in administration, in all the manifold affairs of men’.¹ In a society increasingly orientated according to the criterion of social utility, the absence of a recognisable and accepted social function could indeed be viewed as a severe, if not insuperable, hindrance for any academic discipline. The position of what is known as Fach-historie (academic history) in Germany would, however, seem to be even more precarious than in the United Kingdom. Indeed its latent dilemma was already pinpointed after the First World War, when Theodor Heuss, the first President of the German Federal Republic, referred to the need to reappraise Nietzsche’s original questioning of the usefulness of history as a whole as far as the practical problems of life were concerned.² The American historian Fritz Stern, while stressing that the tensions between history and the social sciences were a common phenomenon in the Western world, nevertheless viewed this essentially as a ‘German problem’.³ Without at this juncture initiating a debate as to why this has become a specifically German concern, it is nevertheless clear that throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, the so-called ‘New Social History’, with its distinctive and substantive links with many areas of the social sciences, found little response within the weighty and traditional world of German historical writing. Jürgen Kocka, for example, has already stressed the extent to which research on social structures and processes, including migration, social mobility, family history and stratification patterns, was simply not undertaken during this critical period.⁴ With perhaps a few notable exceptions, such as Blaschke and Köllman, the important sphere of historical demography was hardly explored.⁵ And yet research into the history of the family could be said to exercise a central function, simply because as a subject of historical analysis it incorporates a wide variety of different subject areas including, of course, economics, anthropology, demography and sociology. The growth of historical research into this essentially diffuse and diverse subject area over the last few years can therefore be taken perhaps as a touchstone for the general progress of the ‘New Social History’ in Germany as a whole.

German involvement in the initial development of studies in the history of the family in the previous decade was very limited indeed. The publication of the proceedings of the Cambridge conference of 1969⁶ marked a turning-point in the development of historical interest in the composition and structure of the European family. Significantly at this juncture German research was only in its developmental stage and no German contribution was included in this important volume. However in the opening years of the 1970s the situation in Germany was to change fairly radically, with the appearance of a number of contributions relating either directly or indirectly to the role and function of the family in historical perspective. Sabean’s work on household formation and migration patterns in Württemberg,⁷ the research of Engelsing and Schneider on living costs and working-class budgets,⁸ and the publications of Shorter and Phayer on illegitimacy and the problem of ‘modernisation’ in German society,⁹ are good examples of the increasing involvement of historians in family history and its allied subject areas. The appearance of the double issue of the periodical Geschichte und Gesellschaft in 1975¹⁰ devoted to the history of the family could be said to indicate an important breakthrough in this discipline. Not only did the contributions of Rosenbaum¹¹ and Mitterauer¹² pinpoint crucial weaknesses in the restrictive nature of Laslett’s emphasis on ‘Mean Household Size’ (the infamous ‘mean of means’) and the inherent danger of excluding non-numerative evidence in family analysis, but Karin Hausen was able expertly to identify key areas of weakness in current research.¹³ At the same time a possible framework was suggested for future work in this field. In contrast to the established direction of the ‘Cambridge School’, future research was to emphasise the role of the family within the existing productive system and as a function of its specific location within the established hierarchy of social class. The family was to be viewed as a process rather than as a static unit. It was therefore quite reasonable for a recent commentator to claim that a ‘take-off as far as research in this general area was concerned was indeed ‘imminent’.¹⁴ German historians appeared increasingly in a position not only to develop this subject as a dynamic new element within the traditional school of history, but also to provide a significantly original contribution to the further development of the discipline as a whole.¹⁵ The following discussion will attempt to provide an analysis of existing trends, particularly within the context of a generally accepted need to relate research into the family to underlying socio-economic parameters. It will examine existing literature from a number of specific general approaches – studies concerned with family and household analysis, with historical demography, with the function of the family within the economy, and finally research connected with folklore, legal history and other ancillary fields.

II

A turning-point in the overall development of historical studies of the family was the publication of an important collection of essays in historical social structure edited by Laslett and Wall.¹⁶ Laslett was determined to provide an effective scheme of classification which would facilitate a comparative analysis of family structure both spatially and across time. It was believed that such a scheme would allow historians to determine the evolution of family and household structure from the late Middle Ages onward. As a result of the empirical research associated with Laslett’s approach the traditional hypothesis which envisaged a distinct evolution from the large, extended, multi-generational household of the pre-industrial age to the nuclear family of the industrial age has been completely refuted. In its place has emerged a nuclear family structure which essentially has remained constant over time, and which remained relatively unaffected by the onset and progress of the industrial revolution. Nevertheless despite the value of Laslett’s empirical approach, which has dominated studies into the history of the family throughout the 1970s, there has been increasing criticism of the scheme of classification and of the methodological framework of analysis as a whole. Furthermore, the mounting criticism levied at the Laslett approach would seem to be largely justified. Although it would be inappropriate at this juncture to present a further critique, two particular points will suffice for the moment to highlight the inherent weakness of his general approach to family history. First, Laslett’s methodology cannot control for the age of the household head, although this clearly represents a critical variable in determining household structure. Secondly, the process of classification and quantification (family, household and houseful) only serves to introduce an artificial distinctness and rigidity into any discussion of household organisation. It is therefore encouraging to note that German research on family structure per se, as a comparative late-starter in the field, has been able to avoid at least some of the pitfalls inherent in the original methodology. Brunner’s early emphasis on the concept of das ganze Haus (the ‘whole house’ or household)¹⁷ may well have benefited later research workers in more than one respect. His emphasis on the inherent unity between production and consumption, on the one hand, and physical reproduction, on the other hand, focused attention on the inherent limitations implicit in an undue concentration on a simple numerative analysis of household and family structure. As a result the more detailed work on census material and the clearly more profitable Seelenbeschreibungen (an early form of census) has not suffered from a too rigid approach.¹⁸ Certainly Mitterauer’s work on Austria deserves note in this respect, particularly as he has confirmed the earlier impression that ‘blood and marriage’ were relatively unimportant in determining household composition.¹⁹ Equally important is his emphasis on household role and the structure of the co-resident domestic group, including nonrelatives. However even within this sphere insufficient attention is often devoted to the effect of the life-cycle. In Hartinger’s recent analysis of family and social structure in Bavaria, for example, which utilises identical material reaching back into the mid-seventeenth century, the tendency to revert to an unduly narrow static approach, as embodied in Laslett’s methodological framework, is only too evident.²⁰ It can only be hoped that future exploitation of this comparatively rich source of information, particularly the Seelenbeschreibungen in the Catholic areas of Germany, will realise the optimal potential that can be obtained from the available material.

A similar criticism can be levied at more general attempts to chart the history of the German family as a whole. Although it is clearly useful to have general histories even if specific research results are still meagre, such publications are still rather premature and frequently unsatisfactory. Weber-Kellermann does emphasise the role of the family as a centre of production and does devote an important section to the ‘emancipation of the child’,²¹ but the almost total dependence on contemporary literary evidence hints perhaps at some fundamental weaknesses. Helmut Möller’s earlier work on the ‘kleinbürgerliche Familie’ (lower middle-class family), however, is clearly in a different category.²² It emphasises the need to chart the overall socialisation process of the lower middle class and to take into consideration such factors as living standards, income levels, accommodation, orientation systems and the significance of day-to-day events such as births, marriages and deaths, as well as local festivals. It would be highly desirable to have at one’s disposal a greater range of similar studies of different social groups, whether urban or rural based, and in particular of the middle class which has not yet really received adequate treatment. And yet Möller’s analysis of household size is very poor, dependent largely on the evidence provided by the pioneering work of O. K. Roller and other earlier writers.²³ The section on the socialisation process, for example, would have benefited from the inclusion of additional information on a number of other factors, including fluctuations in the average number of children per family.

A basic problem common to most existing publications in this sphere is the failure to adopt a sufficiently rigorous theoretical framework. Elder has recently outlined five developments in sociology since the early 1960s that bear closely on the framework for the general examination of family life: the evolution of family development as a theoretical framework; cohort analysis of life patterns; life-span developmental psychology; life history methods in data collection and retrieval; and time allocation research.²⁴ Clearly the applicability of these developments to the historical study of the family is dependent on the data and archival base, but few attempts have as yet been made to assess their possible contribution to German research in this field. Although sound work has already been achieved in charting such aspects of family life as the choice of marriage partner with its resultant influence on the pattern of social homogeny,²⁵ no attempt has been made to establish a general typology of different life course types. Many areas of family life and interaction have still to be explored. The physical constraints on family life in relation to housing and accommodation have not been examined, apart from Niethammer’s treatment of working-class housing in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.²⁶ The socialisation of children within the family and the emergence of conforming or deviant behaviour patterns are also areas in need of examination, particularly as the socialisation process impinged directly on the formation of personality roles and general attitudes to authority. Inter-generational conflict, as well as the family role of the elderly in historical perspective, have also been largely ignored, apart from studies, such as that by Baumert, dealing principally with the more recent past.²⁷ Indeed this is once again doubly unfortunate – not simply because a theoretical framework to a large extent already e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1. The German Family: A Critical Survey of the Current State of Historical Research
• 2. Family and Role-division: The Polarisation of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century – an Aspect of the Dissociation of Work and Family Life
• 3. Family and ‘Modernisation’: The Peasant Family and Social Change in Nineteenth-century Bavaria
• 4. Family and Household: Social Structures in a German Village Between the Two World Wars
• 5. Women, Family and Death: Excess Mortality of Women in Child-bearing Age in Four Communities in Nineteenth-century Germany
• 6. The Family Life-cycle: A Study of Factory Workers in Nineteenth-century Württemberg
• 7. Overcrowding and Family Life: Working-class Families and the Housing Crisis in Late Nineteenth-century Duisburg
• 8. Women’s Work and the Family: Women Garment Workers in Berlin and Hamburg Before the First World War
• 9. Politics and the Family: Social Democracy and the Working-class Family in Theory and Practice Before 1914
• Notes on Contributors
• Index