From Patriarchy to New Fatherhood Private Family Life and Modernization in 20Th Century’S Austria

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From Patriarchy to New Fatherhood Private Family Life and Modernization in 20Th Century’S Austria Lecture, given at the University of New Orleans / Louisiana in May 2002, revised and published in: Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, Hg., The Americanization / Westernization of Austria, 1st edition 2004, 2nd ed. Routledge 2017. Für diese PDF Version wurden 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 under-went manifold processes of cultural transformation and socio-economic modernization, including the private sphere of family 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, have come to recognize the private family sphere in of itself as one of the maJor impulses towards 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. 1 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 and religious communities interest most – courting, birth- giving, parenting and educating children – is neither completely autonomous nor strongly determined. Instead, family life may be viewed as a productive ‘desire machine,’2 producing hopes for happiness, consumer desires, longing for love and protection, the wish for relaxation, retreat, and much more. Yet, the ‘desire machine’ also produces desires that society either forbids or looks down upon, like the urge to be lazy, aggressive, violent, or even sexually perverted. Illegitimate and partly illega-lized desire remains, for the most part, hidden within the private sphere. One might say that private life fulfills the function of keeping these desires away from the public. In contrast, the private sphere brings to the fore but cannot fully satisfy all that which we miss most of our lifetime. Psychoanalysts posit that we enjoy being fed and protected 2 See Gille Deleuze / Felix Guattari, Antiödipus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie I, Frankfurt / M. 1974, pp. 7– 63. ff. 2 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 also Herbert Marcuse,5 Erik H. Erikson6 and others have maintained, it is precisely desire that preserves in-dividuals 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 resists all private disasters and waves of separations and divorces in late modern western 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 trans-formations of Western modern society? Which concept of transformation appears still appropriate after overcoming neo-imperialistic modernization 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, (1934), Geist, Identität und Gesellschaft, Frankfurt /M. 1973. 5 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1957), Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft. Ein philosophischer Beitrag zu Sigmund Freud, Frankfurt /M. 1979. 6 Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, (1959), Identität und Lebenszyklus, Drei Aufsätze, 2nd edition, Frankfurt / Main 1974. 3 theory of the 1960s and 1970s, which has lost much of its former credibility? Instead of criticizing modernization theory once again, I will 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 re-connect po-litical, 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 up to the present? How have men shaped and reshaped their concepts of being lovers, partners, husbands, and fathers, and how did they per-form in those roles? How did they learn to deal with divorce and separation? And, how is this all connected with or even de-termined by Fordist and neoliberal capitalist economies, and regulated by the late modern European welfare state? In the second part of my lecture, I will talk about a recent mass phenomenon: rebuilding or designing the private as a 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, 4 more com-plex 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? Some general remarks on the long-term development of males’ performance in family life and parenthood in Austrian society during the 20th century 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 social, physical and psychic destructions of World War I and the breakdown of the three largest empires in Europe (the German, the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires), a rather nervous, insecure and vulnerable concept of masculinity and sexual virility arose. After World War I this concept drove thousands of militant men into new civil wars, in Russia, in the Baltic states, and elsewhere. It also called societal, cultural, economic and psychological dimensions of society. See the introductory anthology: Kritische Theorie der Politik, ed. by Ulf Bohmann and Paul Sörensen, Berlin 2019. 5 others back home to their private home front, metaphorically speeking. Intellectuals from different ideo-logical backgrounds, social workers, psychologists, conservative and social democratic politicians, catholic and protestant priests, youth movement representatives as well as many others fostered a relatively new cultural ideal of masculinity, which I call ‘domesti-cated 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 all Europe and more, and drawing plans for the genocide of Jews, Roma and others. Would it be cynical to say that they designed and performed this genocide in the name of their own holy ‘Germanic’ family life? For Nazi elites too, their own modern myth of the 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 8 See Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2005. 6 training camp in family services for girls. This is not the place to dig into further details.9 For the man, staying at home primarily meant rest and relaxation, but also the culturally defined role of a patriarchal husband and father should be performed well. This was and still is part of the widely accepted Western model of a high or late modern, child-centered, so called companionate marriage, characterized by romantic love and sexual fulfillment during the early phase, and by mutual respect and emotional satisfaction even in the later stages. This was and still is the guiding ideal for old and new middle-class families, but we should not overlook that well-trained industrial workers, employees and masters supervising industrial workshops (“labour aristocrats”) can be seen as part of the (lower) middle-class as well. Most of them fully accepted and still accept a culturally modernized, comparatively moderate concept of patriarchy. 9 Because of many unsolved problems with comparing NS, Italian fascism, Austrian fascism, Spanish or Romanian fascism and others, I recommend a tiny book about common features of fascist movements in rhetoric, mentality, ideology and power strategy, written by Umberto Eco, Der ewige Faschismus, 4th edition,
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