Population decline in Germany evokes a call to motherhood, feminist wrath
Nicola Smith
A former top German television newsreader has been accused of evoking the Nazi era with a campaign to encourage women to choose motherhood instead of emancipation and highflying careers.
Eva Herman, 47, is urging women to leave the workplace and embrace a pre-feminist ideal of home-making, cake-baking and child-rearing to save a country with one of Europe’s lowest birth rates: 1.3 children per woman.
“If we carry on in the same way as we have been, then in 100 years’ time we will no longer exist. Germany and Europe will die out,” she said last week.
According to Herman, mothers should be paid £11,000 to £13,500 as “family managers”. Her views are expounded in a book that she has filled with letters from disillusioned career women who found salvation in motherhood.
Feminists have been incensed. One of the fiercest critics has been Alice Schwarzer, a feminist campaigner and magazine editor, who described Herman’s theories as “gibberish between a Stone Age bat and a Mother’s Cross” — the Nazi medal of honour awarded to mothers of more than three children.