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Between Ideal and Reality: Transforming Parenthood in 20th century Germany

Autorin: Mirjam Lober, M.A. 

“In the past, every society and every social class produced the form of family that suited it, according to its social and economic possibilities. Value judgements are therefore forbidden, as is the nostalgic wish for the family of the good old days.” [1] 

In 1989, ethnologist Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann drew this conclusion for the field of family research. More than thirty years later it is still relevant. Families and the associated forms of parenthood have always been and still are diverse. There is no such thing as one typical family, father, or mother. So how did parents and their children live in Germany in the second half of the 20th century? Why can parenthood and care not be thought of separately?  

The factor of care is elementary for the understanding of parenthood. Based on the definition of sociologist Johanna Possinger, family can be understood as a “community with reliable long-term relationships, in which several generations look after each other” [2]. Therefore, family is “wherever people are solidary and provide care for each other” [3], and so is parenthood.  

In the second half of the 20th century, the legal recognition of individuals as parents as well as the ideas of parenthood changed in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in parallel with social developments. In the FRG, the “Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch” from 1900 and the bourgeois Christian family model served as a point of reference for jurisdiction, whereas in the GDR the constitution from 1949 and the “Familiengesetzbuch” from 1965 laid down the framework for the legal structure of family and state access to family and care. It was not before the 1970s that the parent-child relationship instead of marriage increasingly became a family-constituting characteristic.  

The reality of family life shows a different development. Shortly after the Second World War, one third of the families lived “at odds with the traditional ideal of the Christian bourgeois nuclear family”, as historian Christopher Neumaier writes in his monograph “Familie im 20. Jahrhundert [4].  

The analysis of cohabitation arrangements indicates that plural forms of parenthood existed throughout the 20th century and beyond. It was the organisation of care that defined family life. This day-to-day organisation of every parent was embedded in two different framework conditions, depending on which German state they lived in. The GDR established a public childcare system, where children of every age were taken care of, from day-care to even weekly care. In the FRG, state-run childcare was initially only for children of single or poor parents. [5] Parents were often put on a waiting list first. [6] Until the childcare reforms of the 1970s, privately organised care within the family and beyond was the only option for many parents. [7] 

The social changes from the 1970s onwards finally led to an increasing visibility of plural forms of parenthood. However, the bourgeois Christian marriage model of a family did not disappear and still serves as an ideal, desirable, and thus privileged framework for parenthood. It was and is up until today the central point of reference against which “new” or “other” forms and ideas of family and parenthood were and are measured. Parenthood outside this model was and still is exposed to enormous pressure. Even though the current report of the Ministry of Family Affairs acknowledges that “families in Germany have become more diverse, both in the structure of their households, the cross-household parent-child and intergenerational relationships, and in the paths to parenthood” [8], there is still a long way to go. Right now, the German law only addresses the individual phenomenon (e.g. surrogacy, same-sex parenthood, gender-independent parenthood, co-parenting) and not an inclusive regulatory framework which takes into account the diversity of care relationships, that have existed for a long time as history shows. [9] 

 

[1] Weber-Kellermann, Ingeborg: Die Familie. Geschichte, Geschichten und Bilder, Frankfurt 1989, p. 279. 

[2] see Possinger, Johanna: “Familie: Wandel und Persistenz von Geschlecht in der Institution Familie”, in: Kortendiek/Riegraf/Sabisch (ed.), Handbuch interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung. Wiesbaden 2019, p. 1281-1290. 

[3] see ibid. 

[4] Neumaier, Christopher: Familie im 20. Jahrhundert. Konflikte um Ideale, Politiken und Praktiken, Berlin/Boston 2019, p. 425. 

[5] see Gawlich, Max: Die Entwicklung der außerhäuslichen Kinderbetreuung in BRD und DDR, in: Zeit mit (Groß-)Vätern. Elternschaft nach dem Boom, https://grossvater.hypotheses.org/355, 05.06.2021 (access: 17/11/2021). 

[6] With the exception of parents with a migration background, who were often not even listed. See Stokes, Lauren: Fear of the Family. Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany, Oxford 2022 [forthcoming]. 

[7] see Kindergarten laws, Kindertagesstättengesetz of the federal states. 

[8] Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (ed.): Eltern sein in Deutschland. Zusammenfassung des Gutachtens der Sachverständigenkommission, 2021, p. 9, https://www.bmfsfj.de/resource/blob/174072/901fc1e82a5f657ea9eaaaa4a3fb140d/neunter-familienbericht-kurzfassung-data.pdf, (access: 17/11/2021). 

[9] see Biggel/Ditzen/Frech/Lober/Patzel-Mattern/Schulz/Weller: “Elternschaft im Wandel: From status to contract?”, in: AcP 221 (2021), Heft 6 [forthcoming]. 

 

 

 

Mirjam Lober is a research associate at the department of social and economic history at Heidelberg University. Since August 2020 she works for the interdisciplinary research project “Transforming Parenthood – Elternschaft im Wandel”.  

 

 

 


Diesen Artikel zitieren: Mirjam Lober: Between Ideal and Reality: Transforming Parenthood in 20th century Germany, in: Zeit mit (Groß-)Vätern. Elternschaft nach dem Boom, https://grossvater.hypotheses.org/663, 03.09.2022, (abgerufen am: Datum).


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
WhoCares-Blog (3. September 2022). Between Ideal and Reality: Transforming Parenthood in 20th century Germany. Who Cares? Abgerufen am 8. Juni 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/p7zx


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