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Lecture, given at the University of New Orleans / Louisiana in May 2002, revised and published in: Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, Hg., The AmericanizaKon / WesternizaKon of Austria, 1st ediKon 2004, 2nd ed. Routledge 2017, ISBN 0-7658-0803-X; ISBN 978-0-7658-0803-5 pbk) Für diese PDF Version wurden vom Autor einige Korrekturen und Aktualisierungen im Text und in den Fußnoten vorgenommen. Reinhard Sieder / University of Vienna From Patriarchy to New Fatherhood Private family life and modernization in 20th century’s Austria Austrian society in the 20th century underwent manifold processes of transformation and modernization, including the sphere of private life.1 Older, Marxist-inspired theoretical models tend to explain private family life as being strongly determined by modern civil law, canon law, politics, economy and society. Post-structural sociologists and recent propositions of Critical Theory, however, do not believe that family life depends exclusively on legislation and changes in the modes and means of production and reproduction. Instead, these intellectual traditions have come to recognize the private family sphere in of itself as one of the major impulses towards transforming society, despite being connected to the economy and the public at large in thousands of different ways. Thus, the private sphere of family life, and what governments interests most - birth-giving and parenting - is neither completely autonomous nor strongly determined. Instead, family life may be viewed as an interactive ‘desire machine,’2 producing hopes for happiness, consumer desires, longing for love and protection, the wish for relaxation, retreat, and so on. Yet, such ‘desire machine’ also produces desire that society either forbids or looks down upon, such as the urge to be lazy, aggressive, violent, or even sexually perverted. Illegitimate and partly illegalized desire remains, for the most part, hidden within the private sphere. One might say that private life 1 Here, I am referring to changes in private life, which have developed in Western Europe over a ‘longue durée’ of two to three hundred years. I define ‘private life’ as that which is not in the workplace and outside the public sphere. ‘Private life’ thus refers primarily to the sphere of personal relationships as a system of interaction and communication, by which bodily, social, psychic, intellectual and emotional competences and abilities are produced and re-produced. In short, ‘private life’ constitutes an area of ‘human capital’ or human resources, which is essential for society overall. 2 See Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Antiödipus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie I, Frankfurt am Main 1974, pp. 7–63. ff. 1 fulfills the function of keeping these desires away from the public. In contrast, the private sphere brings to the fore but cannot fully satisfy that which we miss most of our lifetime. Psychoanalysts posit that we enjoy being fed and protected within the amniotic sac, and this creates, in their view, an unconscious longing for the whole rest of our lives. As Sigmund Freud3 and George Herbert Mead4 have first argued, and subsequently Herbert Marcuse,5 Erik H. Erikson6 and others have maintained, it is precisely desire that preserves individuals and groups, politics, religions and governments belief in the family as a sort of ‘heaven on earth,’ at least if social politics, religions or human sciences protect it from the evils of the profane and consumerist modern world. Astonishingly enough, this modern family myth withstands all private disasters and waves of separations and divorces in late modern societies. In what follows, I wish to introduce some questions concerning private life in Austria during the 20th century: Which changes are to be observed and how far are they intertwined with other transformations of Western modern society? Which concept of transformation appears appropriate after neo-imperialistic modernization theory of the 1960s and 1970s has lost much of its credibility? Instead of criticizing modernization theory once again, I ask for a social constructivist concept, which should be compatible with poststructuralist theories like the Theory of Praxis (Bourdieu) and recent Critical Theory, which seems able to connect political, economic, socio-cultural and psychological aspects and research issues.7 I will focus my lecture on the situation faced by Austrian men during the 20th century. How have male patterns of being, feeling and living ‘privately’ altered since First World War and 3 Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), in: Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe vol. IX, pp. 192-270. 4 George H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society, (University of Chicago 1934), Geist, Identität und Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main 1973. 5 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1957), Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft. Ein philosophischer Beitrag zu Sigmund Freud, Frankfurt am Main 1979. 6 Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, (1959), Identität und Lebenszyklus, Drei Aufsätze, 2nd edition, Frankfurt am Main 1974. 7 After the classic Critical Theory of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas et al.), recent Critical Theory is obviously extending its realms. It seems able to incorporate post-structural theories like Bourdieus Theory of Praxis, and re-contextualize again what specialist sciences have separated: political, societal, cultural, economic and psychological dimensions of society. See the introductory anthology: Kritische Theorie der Politik. Herausgegeben von Ulf Bohmann und Paul Sörensen, Berlin 2019. 2 up to the present? How have men shaped and reshaped their concepts of being lovers, partners, husbands, and fathers, and how did they perform in those roles? How did they learn to deal with divorce and separation? And, how is this all connected with - or even determined by - capitalist economy, and regulated by the modern and late modern European welfare state? In the second part of my lecture, I will talk about a recent mass phenomenon: rebuilding or re-designing the private as a more complex and fragile post-divorce family system. Does this change the intra-psychic model of being a father and the praxis of parenting? What do we know in the meantime about the many non-resident fathers, who had left the former family household? Are there new ways to keep the relationship between father and child close and nourishing for both sides? – I will start now with some general remarks on the long-term development of males’ performance in family life and parenthood in Austrian society during the 20th century. This will be the backdrop against which more specific questions on males and fathers in post-divorce family-systems will be raised in the second part of the lecture. * After the physical and psychic destructions of World War I and the breakdown of the three largest empires in Europe (the German, Habsburg and Ottoman empires), a rather nervous and insecure concept of masculinity and sexual virility arose. This concept drove thousands of militant men into new civil wars, in Russia, in the Baltic states, and elsewhere. It also called others back home to their private home front, so to say. Intellectuals from different ideological backgrounds, social workers, psychologists, social democrat politicians, catholic and protestant priests, youth movement representatives as well as many others fostered a relatively new cultural ideal of masculinity, which I call ‘domesticated masculinity.’ Contrary to what is often assumed in contemporary history, this model was even accepted by militant Austrian fascist groups and National Socialists in the 1930s and early 1940s,8 at the very same time as when the Nazis were preparing themselves physically and mentally to conquer Europe, and drawing plans for the genocide of Jews, Roma and others. Would it be cynical to 8 This is a main argument in Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2005. 3 say that they designed and performed the genocide in the name of their own holy “Germanic” family life? For Nazi elites too, the myth of the ‘German Family’ always included the father playing with and educating his children, even if fatherly activities were clearly limited in scope and time; and it encompassed a playground for pre-military games for boys and a basic training camp in family services for girls. This is not the place to dig into details.9 For the man, staying at home primarily meant rest and relaxation, and secondarily, performing the role of a patriarchal husband and father. This was and still is part of the widely accepted model of the modern, child-centered, companionate marriage, characterized by romantic love and sexual fulfillment during the early phase, mutual respect, and emotional satisfaction in late marriage. Certainly, this was primarily the guiding ideal for middle-class families, but we should not overlook that well-trained industrial workers and especially masters supervising industrial workshops (“labour aristocrats”) must be seen as part of the lower middle-class. They fully accepted a moderate patriarchal concept. In the 1920s and early 1930s, above all the Social Democrats ‘modernized’ the lower middle class and parts of the working class by improving education in kindergartens and schools, and more comfortable housing and social and medical control was part of their local politics. The famous Viennese municipal housing schemes (Gemeindebauten), the science-based welfare office (Jugendamt) and other