Berlin Wall: The tear that once shaped the lives of German women still echoes today

BERLIN (AP) — Like many other young women living in communist East Germany, Solveig Leo thought nothing of balancing work and motherhood. The mother of two was able to run a large state farm in the northeastern village of Bantskov because child care was widely available.

Contrast this with Claudia Huth, a mother of five who grew up in capitalist West Germany. Huth quit her job as a bank clerk when she was pregnant with her first child and lived the life of a traditional housewife in the village of Egelsbach in Hesse, raising her children and caring for her husband, who worked as a chemist.

Both Leo and Huth played roles that were in many ways typical of women in the very different political systems that governed Germany during the decades of its division after the country’s defeat in World War II in 1945.

How Germany celebrates the 35th anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall On November 9, 1989—and the country’s reunification less than a year later, on October 3, 1990—many in Germany are reflecting on how the lives of women who diverged so sharply under communism and capitalism became much more similar again—though some differences remain today .

“In West Germany, women – not all, but many – had to fight for their right to have a career,” said Clara Marz, curator of an exhibition on women in divided Germany for the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship. in Germany.

Meanwhile, women in East Germany often had jobs even though it was something “they were ordered to do from above,” she added.

Built in 1961, the Wall stood on the front lines of the Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets for 28 years. It was built by the communist regime to cut off East Germans from the perceived ideological contamination of the West and to stem the flow of people fleeing East Germany.

Today, only a few sections of the 156.4-kilometer barrier around the capitalist exclave of West Berlin remain, mainly as a tourist attraction.

“All the heavy industry was in the west, there was nothing here,” Leo, now 81, said during a recent interview, recalling her life as a woman under communism. “East Germany was forced to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union. Women needed to find their own way out of this suffering.”

By contrast, Leo said, women in the West didn’t have to work because they were “corrupted by the Marshall Plan,” a generous United States reconstruction plan that poured billions of dollars into West Germany and other European countries after the war.

In capitalist West Germany, the economy recovered so quickly from the total devastation of World War II that people soon began talking about the Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” that brought them prosperity and stability less than 10 years after the war.

However, this economic success indirectly hindered women’s desire for equal rights. Most West German women stayed at home and had to take care of their households while their husbands worked. Religion also played a much larger role than in atheistic East Germany, limiting women to the traditional role of family caregivers.

Mothers who tried to break out of these conventions and get jobs were infamously called Rabenmutter, or indifferent mothers who put work before family.

Not all West German women perceived their traditional roles as restrictive.

“I always had the idea of ​​being with my children because I liked being with them,” said Huth, now 69. “It never occurred to me to go to work.”

More than three decades after German reunification, a new generation of women is barely aware of the different lives their mothers and grandmothers led depending on where in the country they lived. For most, combining work and motherhood has also become a normal way of life. life.

Hannah Fiedler, an 18-year-old high school graduate from Berlin, said the fact that her family lived in East Germany during the country’s decades of division does not affect her life today.

“East or West is not even a topic in our family anymore,” she said, sitting on a bench near a narrow cobbled path in the capital’s Mitte district that marks a former section of the Berlin Wall into the then-divided city.

She also said that she did not experience any disadvantages as a child because she is a woman.

“I’m white and privileged – for better or worse – I don’t expect any problems as I enter the working world in the future,” she said.

Some small differences between the previously divided parts of Germany remain. According to a 2023 study by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, 74% of women work in the former East, compared to 71.5% in the West.

Child care is also still more affordable in the former East than in the West.

In 2018, 57% of children under 3 years of age were looked after in child care institutions in the eastern state of Saxony. According to the German Federal Statistical Office, the figure is 27% in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and 44% in Hamburg and Bremen.

Germany generally lags behind some other European countries when it comes to gender equality.

Only 31.4% of legislators in German Women’s National Parliamentcompared to 41% in the Belgian parliament, 43.6% in Denmark, 45% in Norway and 45.6% in Sweden.

Still, Leo, an 81-year-old farmer from the former East Germany, hopes that eventually women across the country will have the same opportunities.

“I can’t imagine there are women who don’t like being independent,” she said.

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Jan M. Olsen contributed from Copenhagen.