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More Than a Few Good Women: Germany is a Land of Ideas, and Many Active Minds Engaged in Lifelong Learning – Four Amazing Profiles
As Aretha Franklin sang along with the Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox in the soulful 1980s pop anthem “Sisters are Doing it for Themselves”, women have entered the workforce and public life in increasing numbers over the past half century. ”There was a time when they used to say that behind every great man, there had to be a great woman,” the two divas warbled. But the times have changed: In Germany, as around the world, women have in recent decades shaped new social movements, defined intellectual discourse – and led the country. Four German women of the 50plus generation – Angela Merkel, Alice Schwarzer, Margarete Mitscherlich and Trude Unruh – demonstrate how the power of ideas, hard work and discourse with the world at large keep minds sharp over a lifetime.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the first woman and the first East German ever to hold the country’s most important political office. Merkel was born in the northern port city of Hamburg on July 17, 1954. Her family moved to the Baltic Coast in the former East Germany, where she became a physicist. Merkel joined the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party right after German unification in 1990. At the same time, she also immediately became a parliamentarian in the German Bundestag. As the chancellor of the unified Germany, Merkel does not talk much about her East German origins. She does call the fall of the Berlin Wall “a defining moment for me. I realized that nothing ever has to stay the way it is.” She rose steadily through the upper echelons of the CDU ranks to score a November 2005 election victory and become German chancellor. Merkel’s abilitiy to deliver the goods as a leader and diplomat has been tested many times over during both the 2007 German EU and G8 presidencies – not to mention many times since then. She helped relaunch the stalled EU constitution that same year during Germany’s EU presidency and brokered a climate accord among leading industrialised during Germany’s G8 presidency. For the second year in a row, Merkel was named the world's most powerful woman by the US magazine Forbes in August 2007. "She continued to impress the world with her cool leadership at two back-to-back summits," the magazine said on its website. "First, she stuck to her principles, getting G8 leaders to agree to significant cuts in carbon emissions, among other things. Merkel later corralled European Union countries into an agreement on a treaty to replace the EU constitution." You can find out more about Merkel at www.Germany.info and at her official website www.bundeskanzlerin.de. To stay in touch, you can also subscribe to video podcasts by the German chancellor. Links
Alice Schwarzer is as much an icon for the German feminist movement as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan in the United States. She is the founder of “Emma”, Germany’s answer to America’s iconic “Ms.” magazine, founded by Steinem and first published in 1972. The first issue of “Emma” was published in January 1977. The Cologne-based feminist magazine has a circulation of about 40,000 and reaches more than 120,000 readers. Its editors take pride in the fact that some 54 percent of “Emma” readers are under 40 and many are “overwhelmingly well-educated”, as Schwarzer has proudly put it. “I think we have achieved a lot,” she stated when the magazine celebrated its 30th anniversary in January 2007, not only with regard to her magazine but also to advances made by Germany’s feminist movement. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also had her say in the anniversary edition. What “bothered” her, however, about the publication is “the fact that a magazine like ‘Emma’ is still necessary after 30 years”. Merkel is keenly aware of the need to advance gender equality further. Schwarzer, who was born on Dec. 3, 1942 and raised in the western German city of Wuppertal by a single mother and her grandparents, began working as a journalist in 1969. In the early 1970s she worked as a freelancer for different media in Paris, where she also studied psychology and sociology. One of her best-known books is Der kleine Unterschied und seine großen Folgen (The Little Difference and its Huge Consequence). The book, which was published in 1975 and translated into a dozen languages, created awareness and triggered a transformative debate about gender equality in Germany. She has also written biographies of prominent German women, including German Green Party founding member Petra Kelly and Marion Dönhoff, the grand dame publisher of highbrow Hamburg-based weekly Die Zeit. Alice Schwarzer is Germany’s best known contemporary feminist. She has also become an institution in German television with her frequent appearances on the talk show circuit. www.emma.de Links
Margarete Mitscherlich is a German-Danish psychoanalyst who co-wrote one of Germany's most important postwar books, about the mechanisms of collective repression. She wrote about World War II and its (psychological) consequences. With her husband Alexander, Margarete Mitscherlich penned "The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior". First published in 1967, passages of the book eventually found their way into school textbooks in Germany. It was also translated into English in the 1970s. The debate around the book helped German society to take responsibility for World War II. Mitscherlich was born on July 17, 1917 in Denmark, along the northern German border. Her mother was a German teacher and her father a Danish doctor. During the Nazi dictatorship, the young Mitscherlich, née Nielsen, grew up in Germany and Denmark. She studied medicine and worked in Switzerland, where she met her husband, Alexander Mitscherlich. They also jointly worked at the Psychosomatic Clinic in Heidelberg and then later at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, where Margarete Mitscherlich was also head of psychoanalytic training. Mitscherlich continues to track developments in society with her psychoanalytic mind. She sees Germany as a stable democracy, one that was once dominated by men and can also boast a woman (Angela Merkel) as its leader. It's also a culture in which every taxi driver is familiar with the fundamental terms of psychoanalysis, she remarked. In an interview with the German press agency dpa, however, she said she did have a little piece of advice for succeeding generations: to remember that "one does not necessarily become wiser with age." Her typical day: "I read a lot, think a lot, write a lot and work a lot.” (from Deutsche Welle)
Trude Unruh could have gone gracefully into her golden years. But, true to her name – Unruh, or unruhig, literally means “restless” in German – she has always had something else up her sleeve. The energetic and outspoken Unruh shows is the chief architect of Germany’s only political party centered on representing the 50plus generation. Unruh called Die Grauen - Graue Panther (Gray Panthers), into being in 1989 and has led it into the 21st century. Unruh was previously active in three major German political parties. “I simply always spoke my mind and said what bothered me,” she told Hamburg-based news and lifestyle magazine Stern in 2005 by way of explaining her past “party-hopping” style. “So it’s clear that didn’t suit everybody. I was never shy.” And she was always dedicated: In the same Stern interview, Unruh also noted that she worked about 16 hours a day, although she now takes a few a naps from time to time. “But even when I’m half asleep I think of politics,” she insisted. When asked about leisure time, Unruh replied: “I don’t want any. Reading, thinking – this is free time for me. That is a holiday.” Trude Unruh was born on March 7, 1925 in the western German city of Essen and raised by her grandparents. As a young woman she worked for German industrial giant Krupp. Later she and her husband ran small family businesses with their two sons. In 1968 the family relocated to the city of Wuppertal, where Unruh first became politically active. She even spawned a new social movement in 1975, a senior protection league that came to be known as the “Gray Panthers”. In 1989, after serving as an independent parliamentary deputy on a Green Party ticket, she called the Gray Panthers into being as a bona fide political party. “I wanted to achieve something,” she said in a 2005 interview. Unruh’s overarching goal: to create a multi-generational society.
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