Now and again, I find something in the Retrowurst files that I genuinely can’t remember writing. A symptom of ageing brain? I’m not convinced, as much of the category and brand-related stuff seems to have been filed away in a readily accessible place. Discounters to drugstores, beers to burgers. Maybe there’s an element of denial at play, as these pieces tend to be about social issues rather than marketing and brand communications. But what they have in common is that, reading them back nearly two decades later, they feel as if they hail from a different world.
This piece, taking the not-particularly-niche subject of “women”, used two self-help type books (one light in tone and tongue-in-cheek, the other sadly not) to introduce the theme of the lot of women, especially mothers, in Germany in the early 2000s.
Does anyone remember Das Eva Prinzip by Eva Herman or Das Uschi Prinzip by Meike Rensch-Bergner? I wonder if the books are even still in print ...
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A well-known news reader and TV presenter is causing a storm here in Germany with a book that very few people have yet read but that on which almost everyone has an opinion to offer. The lady in question is called Eva Herman and she has called her book “Das Eva-Prinzip”. It really doesn’t matter one jot if you’ve never heard of Frau Herman as she and her book only really play a catalytic role in re-lighting a fire that has been smoldering away here for years.
In “Das Eva Prinzip”, apparently (as I also haven’t read it as the publication date seems to keep moving backwards and forwards like a silly girl who can’t make up her mind), Frau Herman sets out the case that feminism was a big mistake and has only led to women being unhappy, denying their innate womanliness and losing out on having children. It is a call to recognize that men are men, women are women, and men should be out working or hunting and bringing home the bacon and Bratwurst while women should stay at home and look after the children. If we all stuck to the way things should be, a lot more children would be born in Germany, and it would be a much happier place.
This jolly little tome, incidentally, is hot on the heels of another sort of Prinzip, “Das Uschi Prinzip”, which was a sort of German version of “The Rules”, giving tips and advice to young women on how the “catch the man of their dreams” by using their womanly wiles to the full rather than behaving like some sort of aggressive second-rate man. (See www.uschi-und-uschi.de where the author has made a whole concept out of this, offering seminars, workshops and the like!)
But let’s get back to Frau Herman. Interestingly, she doesn’t seem to have lived her own life so far according to her own principles and one can only imagine that she has written the book out of the kindness of her heart to stop young women from making the same foolish choices and mistakes that she did. Eva Herman studied for a career in hotel management and moved into journalism and TV. She has already written a number of books on such subjects as breastfeeding and how to get your child to sleep through the night (A sort of German Gina Ford.). In between she has gone through four husbands and has one child from the third of these. Just the sort of person that you want to have telling you how to run your life!
Some commentators have gone as far as to say that Frau Herman’s book has nothing to do with German society as a whole but is her own personal outpouring or sort of therapy to still her longing for a perfect family life that seems never to be satisfied. Eva Herman’s father died when she was only 6, her mother worked and it seems that, to compound this unhappiness, little Eva was not breastfed.
Whether we choose to agree with her or not, Eva Herman’s book argues for one solution to one of the main issues that is facing Germany in the 21st century: one of the largest countries in the E.U also has the lowest birthrate at just 1.35. The future economic implications of this are clear so maybe we shouldn’t criticize Frau Herman too much, whatever her motives, in at least addressing the issue and presenting one way forward (or backward, depending on your perspective!).
There is a strange paradox in Germany whereby men and women have equal opportunities as long as the women are childless. In the school and study years, girls are even ahead of boys in terms of academic qualifications: there are more girls than boys with Abitur, which is like German A-Levels and it is expected that, by 2010, more women will go on to further education than men. But it seems that more and more intelligent and well-qualified young women are opting out of having a family:
26% of 37-40 years old German women are childless.
33.5% of women with further education in Germany are childless.
42% of women born in 1960 who have higher education are childless.
The reason for this is not, perhaps, as Eva Herman suggests, that these young women are making a mistake by pursuing a career, but more because German society in its structure and attitude makes it extremely difficult for women to have a career and a family. Structurally, it starts with the availability of pre-kindergarten childcare which is almost non-existent. Women are encouraged not to go back to work for the first three years (they are not financially rewarded but are at least assured of a job when and if they go back, although the job may bear little resemblance to the one that they left.) It is not unusual for those women that can to plan their children at 3-yearly intervals so that they can start the next round of Erziehungsurlaub as soon as the last one finishes. Employers, with odd exceptions, aren’t exactly welcoming when women come back, and one gets the feeling that a woman who comes back and works part-time is resented as a cost who probably needs re-training and who almost certainly is going disappear punctually each day rather than being appreciated for what she can bring to enrich the company.
You may have noticed “part-time” there. Why can’t these women come back and do a full-time job, you may wonder. The answer lies in the German school system, another example of an element of society that has not kept pace with the modern world. The fact is that in Germany, most children, from the age of 6-19, only attend school in the mornings. It is expected that someone will collect them at lunchtime, feed them, supervise their homework (which also starts at age 6) and then organize and ferry them around to any sports or hobbies in the afternoon. While most UK schools have sports teams, children in Germany have to join a club independent of the school to play football, hockey or whatever.
Some day-care places are available for primary school children, but these are few and far between, and even then, these places tend to be until 2 or 3 o’clock and only if you are very lucky, for a “whole day” which usually means until 4:30 or so. Priority is given to single mothers and cases of financial hardship, not to “dual earners”. With this kind of system in place and no signs of change in the near future, it is no wonder that many bright young women are choosing career over children. And if the system itself wasn’t bad enough, the overwhelming attitude from society in general doesn’t make things any better. There is an expression that seems only to exist in Germany – Rabenmutter – literally “Raven Mother” for any woman that dares to think that she might be able to carry on her career and let her children play happily and supervised by professionals in the company of other children until the late hour of 4pm! Why ravens should be party to this sort of insult is beyond me – there seems to be no biological basis for this and one would have thought that maybe a cuckoo was a better analogy. But perhaps the Germans just love their cuckoo clocks too much to use the bird’s name as an insult!
Interestingly, IKEA have timed their latest advertising campaign here impeccably to fit in with this controversy. Posters have appeared around the cities with provocative messages such as “Women must combine household, children and career!”, “Women who want children must give up their career!” and “Men must go to work, women must change nappies!” This is all a teaser, of course for the IKEA way of a more individual and comfortable life at home, whatever way you choose to live, work and have a family. And that’s the key to it, of course. German women don’t need any more Principles from Eva, Uschi and the rest, just flexibility in the system and support and tolerance from society to run their lives in the way that suits them.
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Eighteen years later, many of the mums I knew from the Elterbeirat or Kinderturnen are now Omas. And yes, that is reflected in the German birthrate. The lot of working mums has improved a little, with more Kindergarten places available, for children aged 1-3 as well as the 3 - 6 traditional age group. With increased female leadership in politics and business, and fathers playing a bigger role in Erziehung, society attitudes are shifing. Slowly, but shifting never-the-less.
The birth rate reached its low point a couple of years after I wrote this article, in 2008. It crept up a little, due to increased immigration, but has crept down again in recent years, although not below the 2008 low point.
The rate of childlessness rose up to around 2012, but seems to have stabilised, with around a 20% incidence of childlessness amongst all cohorts born 1966 - 1977 (women currently aged 47 - 58). But the rate is much lower amongst women with a low level of education - at around 11%.
And what of Uschi and Eva?
Meike Rensch-Bergner is still writing, and also busy coaching, podcasting and running businesses connected with sewing, tailoring and body-positivity in general.
As for Eva Herman, well, she was sacked from her prominent position as a news anchor by ARD in 2007. She made some unwise remarks about gender roles in Nazi Germany and has now drifted into writing and podcasting outside of the mainstream on Telegram. Topics cover everything from politics and gender roles to spirituality and health.
I haven’t ventured in to see if she’s got anything worth saying, or whether it’s all conspiracy theories and bonkers rants. But then again, I never read her book, either.
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