The German Family (Routledge Revivals) by Richard J. Evans W. R. Lee

Author:Richard J. Evans, W. R. Lee [Richard J. Evans, W. R. Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, Social History, General
ISBN: 9781317550235
Google: QHTbCQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-06-11T16:09:35+00:00

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We have tried to show that the concept of the nuclear or small family does not apply to the social reality of the village in the 1920s and 1930s and is an unsatisfactory tool for analysing its structures, which are better seen in terms of the concept of the ‘whole house’ or ‘household’. Any adequate analysis must, we feel, go beyond the external structure, since only the study of the inner structures can provide insights into the possible functions, modes of production and life-styles of these households. It follows that the empirical analysis of the historical process must accompany any definition of social institutions. Works on the family appear often to adopt a different procedure.

Despite the growing integration of villages into the industrial world, the significance of landed property, family and the household did not decline in the period under review. Their importance in fact increased as household members became increasingly aware of the instabilities of the industrial labour market. This applies especially to the 1920s and again to the period of the Second World War. It is worth noting that only some members of a household would be drawn into the industrial process, and that the income they gained would, in their view, never have sufficed to maintain the household. For some of these members there was a separation between residence and place of work, but the result normally posited in sociological writing – the development of something in the nature of the bourgeois family – did not follow. Household members continued to work in their own household after the end of their industrial working day, and, what is more important, they derived their identity as villagers from this sphere. This explains why, in the 1920s, there was no development of a consciousness of independent wage or salary earners, free to dispose of their own wage. The industrial wage remained only one of several incomes contributing to the upkeep of the whole household. Here we must concede these villagers their own ‘rationality’, regardless of any theoretical concepts, rather than automatically considering their behaviour as irrational. On the whole, therefore, while it is difficult to generalise from a limited case-study, our findings appear to confirm E.P. Thompson’s thesis that industrialisation means different things to people in various social groups and occupations, and that their adaptation to industrialisation implies the formation of different ways of life.27

Finally we should like to repeat that the villagers in the 1920s and 1930s saw themselves as a village community composed of households which could not have survived in this form without mutual cooperation. This community in no way resembled the nostalgic village idyll: it was a strictly hierarchical social order with tight authority structures and strong social compulsions. These structures derived from the widespread poverty of most of the households, and villagers saw in mutual cooperation within a hierarchically ordered world a precious and necessary safeguard against their poverty. The hierarchical social order was closely associated with control over the land and the household, which often became a source of numerous conflicts within households and between them.

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