By The River

The former Communist state known as East Germany was all bad, wasn't it, a place that would have certainly qualified as one of President George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" states had it still been in existence when he uttered those words in 2002. State repression of dissent, a failed economy, and the Berlin Wall were the hallmarks of what Americans know about East Germany.

Wasn't it?

Yesterday in Freiburg, I had lunch with my cousin, Meike Penkwitt, and her old friend Eva Manske, the director of Carl Schurz House, aka, the German-American Institute. Eva grew up in Leipzig in the former East Germany. Eva was the second East German woman I had met through Meike, the other being Sybille Brinz, who I met at Meike's wedding in 2003. Both told me essentially the same thing: as bad as East Germany was in the political sphere, it was very good for women. Women had true equality with men there, something they have lost in the reunification with West Germany after 1990.

Here's a summary of what Eva and Sybille told me, plus some interpretation of my own: In the former East Germany, daycare for children was readily available. Women were strongly encouraged by state policy to work and pursue professions. Everyone's talents were needed to build the communist state. Women were encouraged to be independent and self-reliant. There was no room for outmoded thinking on the proper role of women in the DDR (as East Germany was known).

Contrast that to the non-Communist West German model, where the attitude toward working women bears uncomfortable parallels to the the "Kinder, Kirche, Küche" (children, church, kitchen) model of the Nazi state. There is a widespread belief that women who pursue professions should remain childless. There is even a contemptuous German word, "Rabenmutter," (raven mother), used to refer to a mother who "flies off" to a job and leaves her children in daycare. Daycare in Germany today is expensive and restrictive.

Eva and Meike described a local daycare that requires mothers to spend the first eight weeks at the daycare facility with their child to ease the transition for both. Germany faces a declining birthrate, almost below the replacement level, in part because many women of childbearing age want or need to work, but feel socially pressured not to have children if they do. Don't get me wrong, some German women buy into these attitudes, too (even Eva said there were times in the old DDR when she wished she could be "just a housewife"), but for those who don't, life can be tough.

In France, where Eva actually resides (for my central Pennsylvania readers, France is almost as close to Freiburg as Carlisle is to Harrisburg, and living costs, especially for housing, are lower), the government provides well-run and reasonably-priced state-run daycare.

So arrive at an uncomfortable truth--that East Germany, and communist states in general, were better for women than free-market, capitalist states like West Germany. I've believed for a longtime that we in the West benefited in someways from the Communist East. In my opinion, the existence of Communism acted like a giant vortex, pulling Western nations like the U.S. toward the socialist left on such things as health care and government care for the poor from the 1930s through 1990.

Western capitalists worried greatly about Communism, probably to an unreasonable extent. But because they did, they sought to make Communism less attractive to the working men and women here. In other words, they gave them some of the good things about socialism so they wouldn't be tempted to embrace the bad, i.e., total state control of the economy. I don't think it's only coincidence that since the Berlin Wall fell and most Communist states collapsed in the early 1990s, America has been rapidly shedding those hat-tips to socialism, things like employer-paid health insurance and reasonable income gaps between the rich and working classes enforced by progressive taxation. Free market capitalism is taking its inevitable course. If you can get it, good. If not, too bad for you, loser.

Not that Eva is a victim of "Ostalgia," another German word coinage that means unreasoning nostalgia for the former East Germany. After all, she said, you had to wait 17 years to get an automobile, she recalled, and when it finally arrived, it was a Trabant--the "Trabi" being basicly an ugly metal box with a lawnmower engine. She also described witnessing a police crackdown on well-meaning citizens in Leipzig protesting the industrial pollution that was tolerated in the name of growth of the nation (note to Bush Administration: don't try this at home). But when it came to the status of women, the East Germans got it right.

For the sake of America's future, we need to stop free market capitalism from running rampant. We need to place rules on business to preserve the best of social democracy while not unreasonably impeding the ability of businesses to earn a fair profit.