Miriam Gebhardt, Clemens Wischermann. Familiensozialisation seit 1933 - Verhandlungen über Kontinuität. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007. 211 S. EUR 54.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-515-08827-5.

Reviewed by Jason Tebbe (Department of History, Stephen F. Austin State University)
Published on H-German (January, 2008)

A New Look at Family Socialization and Generational Dynamics

Reflecting trends across the discipline, the history of the family has belatedly moved away from its traditional demographic moorings into the realm of cultural history. More and more historians are examining the meaning of the family, as well as its inner dynamics. This collection of essays looks specifically at the issue of socialization and the role the family plays in the socializing process. The approach is highly interdisciplinary, with essays from historians, sociologists, and pedagogues. Like any collected volume, it is a haphazard affair, but some essays do succeed in offering fresh perspectives on the study of the family.

In their introduction, the editors advocate a generational approach to socialization that takes into account the contested ways that generations form. According to them, children do not merely accept the values and teachings of their parents, but also define themselves against the values of their parents' generation. Furthermore, Gebhardt and Wischermann argue that the generational identities of parents change through their reactions to their children's values. The editors' emphasis on negotiation criticizes static models of socialization and generational formation, a theme continued throughout many of the other articles.

The rest of the book is organized into five sections: "Ambivalent Generational Relationships," "Transfer and the Learning Process," "Memory and Dialogue," "Body Generations," and "Family and Self-Socialization." Kurt Lüscher's essay in the first section theorizes the socialization process from a sociological standpoint. He argues that prior theories of socialization do not properly account for change and ambivalence, and tend to see socialization as a straightforward process of social integration in the sense meant by Emile Durkheim. Arguing against this stance, Lüscher defines socialization as a complicated, lifelong process in which individuals negotiate between their individuality and social expectations. It includes input from grandparents as well as parents, and is formed through physical and social environments. He claims that bodily encounters, a phenomenon neglected by prior theorists, create ambivalences and thus complicate socialization. At the end, Lüscher proposes a "Modul" for socialization that attempts to trace the various influences on an individual's socialization.

In the same section, Gudrun Brockhaus's essay takes a historical approach to the issue of relationships between generations. She discusses Johanna Haarer, the author of a popular child-rearing guide entitled The German Mother and her First Child, first published by a Nazi press in 1936 and then made popular again after the war in an only slightly revised edition. Brockhaus argues that Haarer's book expresses National Socialist ideas about the parent-child relationship in her strict advice to mothers. According to Brockhaus, Haarer turned the mother into a "professional" and "hero" who must "struggle" against her children in an authoritarian manner in order to mold them into good German subjects. Using a psychoanalytic approach, Brockhaus sees fear as the motivating factor behind Haarer's work, fears that reflected the racist mindset of Nazism.

The following article by Markus Höffer-Mehlmer examines parental advice literature after 1945. He also mentions Haarer, who retained her popularity despite her Nazi pedigree. In contrast to Haarer, Benjamin Spock's advice manuals became popular in the 1950s, and replaced Haarer's authoritarian discipline with calls for parents to understand and even learn from their children. Höffer-Mehlmer sees the 1960s and 1970s as a turning point when parental guides advocated "non-authoritarian" methods in contrast to the advice given by Haarer. During the 1980s and 1990s, literature on parenting would become both more extensive and specialized. At the end of the article he briefly contrasts the GDR to the BRD, and finds that advice guides in the East remained explicitly political in nature. Overall, he makes the correct if mundane argument that advice manuals merely reflect pedagogical theories of the time, rather than describing actual parenting practices.

A much more incisive commentary on parental advice literature comes from Miriam Gebhardt, who takes a less chronological approach and profitably compares Johanna Haarer to Benjamin Spock. She argues that while these two authors may seem polar opposites on the surface, they actually express the generally hierarchical nature of advice literature and its grounding in a deep distrust in parents' abilities to raise their children properly. Gebhardt also sees a tendency in advice literature to portray infants as "zombies" totally lacking the ability to make connections with their parents and society. Though she certainly shows the considerable differences between Haarer and Spock, Gebhardt's approach is compelling in its ability to find unexpected connections.

The two following articles depart from advice literature and examine the role of memory in generational formation. Lu Seegers examines the issue of "Vaterlosigkeit" in Germany and the rest of Europe after World War II. She argues that this phenomenon had a profound effect on the postwar generation, not least due to the economic hardship that accompanied it. Seegers makes a compelling call for more research on the subject, and advocates the use of diaries, letters, and oral interviews to understand its effects in the everyday. Andreas Kraft then shifts the discussion of memory to the literature of the Generation of '68. Fitting with the agenda set out by the editors' introduction, he sees a "generational dialogue" between the '68ers and their parents, which took a therapeutic approach to confronting the Nazi past. According to Kraft, the fathers in '68er literature stood in for the Nazi and wartime past, and by distancing themselves from their parents, 68ers could distance themselves from fascism.

The next section deals with the body and generational transmission. Ulf Preuss-Lavsitz examines the relationship between bodily socialization and politics, and in doing so delineates four generations in the last one hundred years with their own attitudes towards their bodies, each progressively more "democratic." In his formulation the disciplined, authoritarian "Untertanen" of the early twentieth century gave way to more questioning children of World War II, who would rebel as "Halbstarken" in the 1950s and become politically engaged in the 1960s. He considers the following generation, usually termed Generation X in America, to be "hedonists" more attuned to the values of consumer capitalism and less interested in politics. Last, he examines the "postmodern" generation of the twenty-first century, which he thinks has dedicated itself to crafting and sculpting its own bodies. Although this activity has given rise to a greater number of body image issues, Preuss-Lavsitx still considers it part of the larger trend of the "democratizing" of the body. The other article in this section, by Heinz Walter and Eva Rass, deals less with the body and more with psychiatry. Their essay treats the thorny subject of Attention Deficit Disorder, and what they perceive as an over-reliance on drugs such as Ritalin to combat it. Their long and sustained argument is compelling in places, especially when it analyzes the reduction of treatment to all psychological disorders to medication.

Andreas Lange's piece ends the book with a persuasive argument on the need to take into account popular culture in the study of socialization. He examines what he calls "self-socialization": the capacity for individuals to undergo socialization without the input of parents and teachers. Global popular culture, in the form of "Sesame Street," the Internet, and Harry Potter, now has as much or more to do with the socializing process as family does, according to Lange. Ultimately, his call for popular culture to be taken seriously as a factor in childhood development should be heeded.

In total, the book does not quite form a cohesive whole, mostly because some of the articles drift from the generational focus laid out by Gebhardt and Wischermann at the beginning. The interdisciplinary nature of the enterprise abets this problem by pulling the subject matter into too many directions. Also, more could have been done to interrogate the category of "generation." Dividing people into generations is notoriously difficult, partly because it means lumping together all people of different gender, racial, class, and sexual categories merely on the basis of their age, and also because it is often hard to tell when one generation starts and another stops. That said, some articles offer new and interesting perspectives on the study of the family. The articles by Gebhardt, Lüscher, Seegers, and Lange are especially noteworthy in their ability to offer approaches to a very old field of study. Furthermore, the book's general thesis about the contested and complicated nature of socialization is particularly persuasive.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.

Citation: Jason Tebbe. Review of Gebhardt, Miriam; Wischermann, Clemens, Familiensozialisation seit 1933 - Verhandlungen über Kontinuität. H-German, H-Net Reviews. January, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14103

Copyright © 2008 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.