Defining the “German” Family in the European Context: Men at Work

Abstract

My introduction closed with the confident reference to a patriarchal family, albeit from the perspective of its imminent demise. As the model of the male-breadwinner family presumably exits the Western stage, its debris beckons closer examination. In uncertain economic times, even such terms as “work” and “breadwinner” become something of a moving target in an integrating Europe, especially given highly publicized economic failures in the Euro zone. Relatively speaking, the EU, with its geographical expansion to the east and south, combined with resistance posed by strong national traditions and cultures, remains attractive for many reasons beyond the surviving potential for prosperity and persistent hope of improved quality of life. When we examine the family in the context of Germany, the model of masculinity bears a further historical burden. The male breadwinner as the wage earner and paterfamilias underwent significant change in the postwar period, ceding the need to work and rebuild to the women. Apart from the iconic images of the Trümmerfrauen , or “rubble women,” who reassembled Berlin’s buildings in the aftermath of allied bombings, cinematic heroines of the economic miracle traumatized male egos. This socioeconomic trend was thematized most archly in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1979 Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun), which not only upset the Nazi model of intact households, but also depicted a repressed social trauma, a quasi-archeological resistance to the current trends toward multiple models of private life that leave the male breadwinner in the proverbial dust.