There is a brouhaha over here about a well-known German TV presenter, Eva Herman, who for some time has been pushing her ideas about how women shouldn't do careers, should stay at home and just be good mommies. It began, oddly enough, about the time she had her baby; then she began praising breastfeeding on TV, and gradually she started a sort of mommy crusade, culminating in a controversial book,
The Eve Principle ("Das Eva-Prinzip"), where she called men who didn't provide for their wives "wimps" and laid out her belief that it is a waste of time for women to pursue a career (pretty rich coming from a wealthy career woman who is still working after becoming a mother).
In other words, she is having a mid-life crisis and is doing it very publicly.
The crowning glory, though, was her
recent assertion that the Nazis had a good family policy. (To quote: "...much was of course bad, such as Adolf Hitler, but some things were also very good. For example the high esteem of mothers. This was gotten rid of by the 1968 generation, and that's why we now have our social mess.")
When her employers demanded an explanation, she offered a half-hearted apology (or non-apology -- more like an attempt to explain it) which only served to tick people off even worse, and her state TV network, NDR, promptly sacked her. And sure enough, neo-Nazi parties such as the
NPD are claiming her as an icon.
Yesterday's edition of our
local paper has an editorial that is suitably acid (quick and dirty translation by yours truly):
Please stop babbling!
People say a lot about women. For example, they like to say that women talk too much. There was even a scientific study recently that took up the question and recorded the flow of speech of men and women with a stopwatch. Without scientific aid, a prominent TV presenter has offered proof that not just men, but women too should sometimes rather remain silent. Eva Herman could have saved herself -- and her public audience -- a lot of trouble.
But she didn't do that and impudently blabbed on about what was supposedly "good" about the Nazi dictatorship. It resulted in her dismissal by the public TV networks. Rightly, in spite of her proffered apology. For a little basic knowledge would have sufficed to expose the reality behind Hitler's praise of the family for what it was: a façade, hypocritical and part of an inhuman racial ideology that removed the rights of families and destroyed them. Even in the rearing of children, parents were mistrusted: Jungvolk (German Youth), Hitler Youth and Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) were there to twist them to the will of the Party. Ms. Herman's problem is not so much her sloppy handling of the blackest chapter of Germany's history, but rather -- see above -- her loquaciousness and her strident crusade for home and hearth. Both paid off well until now. In talk shows, in which endless babbling and shallow provocation are of the essence, she made a name for herself as the jokester and big mouth. With books about God-willed gender roles, she became a leading woman for all those who dreamed about returning to a time when women would clear out the dirt without complaint and wouldn't compete with men for jobs.
What went wrong, Ms. Herman? A PR gag turned into a campaign; the campaign turned into a mission. For applause is addicting. That it came increasingly from the far right was -- apparently -- unimportant to the author and antifeminist Herman. For every provocation -- that's the rule in the media circus -- wears out. She had to lay it on again to secure her own success. And keep on babbling -- preferably that which Joe Sixpack also says. That the 1968 generation is to blame for everything. That not all was bad "back then"...until the gaffe that didn't even get the point across.
Men, according to Herman, are unfortunately sometimes wimps. Nonsense. The men at NDR certainly aren't. They fired their employee. Now Ms. Herman can live the life that she proclaims -- a life for the family, without a career. Wanna bet she doesn't make it?
(Gabi Stief)
