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The Impact of Modernization on Women in Germany
| Article
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18579 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
5,076 Words |
| Author
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Horst J. Helle
Horst J. Helle is professor of sociology at the University of
Munich. |
Women in Germany are far from being a unified and homogeneous group, no matter which generation they belong to. Rather we find women with vastly different values and convictions who are otherwise very similar in age, social status, and level of education. The political groups that work for women's rights in the legislative process tend to gloss over those differences for obvious reasons: They want to be able to speak for all women, and articulating divergent interests of dissenting female cultures would only weaken their position as lobbyists. It will be one of the tasks of this article to point to the differences in the perspectives, intentions, and expectations of German women today. This cannot be done, however, without looking back at the recent history of Germany.
The country was engaged in World War II from 1939 to 1945, but counting the years of loss of inner peace prior to the actual outbreak of military hostilities in the thirties as well as the plight of expellees and refugees and the shortage of food in the forties, one can consider the decade from 1937 to 1947 as the war decade in a wider sense. This decade had a crucial impact on most German women. They experienced the loss of emotional closeness as well as the physical loss of fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons in an effort that would turn out to be not a heroic sacrifice for the beloved country, as such catastrophes had been defined in previous wars, but rather a senseless and even criminal collective undertaking.
Since then, more than forty years have passed. The population of the united Germany is now composed of two distinct age groups: the older segment, whose members have memories of personal experiences from the war decade--and the elderly, of course, who remember World War I too--versus the younger men and women, who were born since the late forties, and to whom the war is mere history.
To many of those who lived through it, the war decade appeared as a catastrophic failure of a regime that had presented itself as a powerful advocate of modernization--be it then of a specific kind. Thus, when national socialism was crushed, progressivism was widely associated with recklessness and danger to a culture that gave every reason for pride if one looked at its more-distant past. Looking favorably upon the past became rather attractive, and not only did a conservative, Konrad Adenauer, become West Germany's first chancellor in 1949, but the Social Democrats under Kurt Schumacher demanded a more national orientation and warned against close ties with the United States and the Western
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