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The rise of family values in Angela Merkel's new Germany

  • 12 June 2006
Angela Merkel’s new Germany bristles with contradictions. On the one hand it is highly secular, fiercely focused on individual freedoms, satisfactions, and affluence. Yet at Easter, all the bookshops have been show-casing, would you believe it, Confirmation! I attended two packed Confirmation services, one of a young relative from a village in Lower Saxony. The whole community was there, and the celebrations went on for days.

A visitor like myself also notes enviously the generosity of State Governments to cultural programs and research centres. Yet the universities are tottering on the edge of financial collapse, especially in the poorer, eastern provinces, and students and young academics are increasingly restive. For the last three months I’ve been living among an elite group of young scholars. Few have any hope of a secure job until they are forty! They have to become entrepreneurs, inventing research programs for themselves, surviving from one temporary ‘project’ to the next. There is virtually no ‘Mittelbau’. One is either a lofty Professor or a precariously situated ‘Assistent.’

Germany’s schools have also registered humiliatingly low scores in a recent international study. At the Rütli school in Berlin, attended largely by immigrants, teachers were so demoralised and menaced by the total indiscipline they encountered that they went to the media and poured out their woes. And then there is the demographic crisis. Women, especially professional, academic, career women are structurally inhibited from having children. Since 1965 the number of live births has almost halved.

In response, phrases such as ‘leading norms’, or ‘family values’ are bandied around. In part, this is a conservative reaction against modern pluralism and against ethnic, particularly Turkish, enclaves. The building of mosques can be fiercely opposed in the suburbs. Reflection about citizenship is complacent, reflecting a middle-class perspective. But the recognition is growing that neither a society nor its schools and families can exist without some integrating vision. Educationalists point out that many families have degenerated into ‘well organized supply centres’, with scant communication, discussion, or shared experience.

A formidable polarizing figure is the dynamic Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Ursula von der Leyen, (47) , whose seven children figure prominently in publicity photos. Legislation introduced by her, and to come into force next year, will provide couples who are both working with ‘parent money’. 68% of the mother’s salary will be paid by the State for 12 months. Whether the legislation will actually promote
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