Erhard Chvojka. Geschichte der Großelternrollen vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Wien: Böhlau Verlag/Wien, 2003. 378 S. (gebunden), ISBN 978-3-205-98465-8.

Reviewed by Jason Tebbe (Department of History, Stephen F. Austin State University)
Published on H-German (November, 2004)

Historicizing Family Values

In the popular historical mind, and indeed in the minds of many professional historians who do not specialize in the history of family, an over-generalized narrative of the European household exists. According to this generalization, pre-modern families tended to live together in a "traditional" extended family household with three generations under one roof, a system transformed by nineteenth-century industrialization into the nuclear, single family household. While household sizes in the twentieth century had shrunk from those of the seventeenth, the narrative of linear change masks the complexity of the changes in family structures in Europe, something historians of the family such as Peter Laslett and Lawrence Stone have been arguing for over twenty-five years.[1] Change in household size and make-up occurred fitfully, with industrialization as an important, but not sole source of family metamorphosis. Erhard Chvojka's Geschichte der Grosselternrollen continues the historiographical tradition of further complicating our understanding of the family in Europe, in his case by focusing on the role of grandparents.

Chvojka builds his argument around a central question, whether the current role of grandparents has been "an anthropological constant." He emphatically maintains that the role of grandparents has not been stable, and asserts that the very active roles that grandparents now often play in the lives of their grandchildren arose out of historical developments. He argues that before the eighteenth century, grandparents did not have a family role qua grandparents; instead, they often served as "ersatz Eltern" for their orphaned grandchildren. In this time, with late marriages and early deaths, few older people were even around to perform the role of grandparent. Those that did survive into old age sometimes did reside in three generation households, but these households represented exceptions rather than the rule. Chvojka identifies the eighteenth century, with its changing demographics and Enlightenment ideas about family and childhood, as the starting point for modern conceptions of grand-parenthood. He further identifies the middle class family of this period as the place where "elders" became "grandparents." During the nineteenth century the image of the grandparent as emotionally involved in the lives of grandchildren strengthened and grew outside of the middle class, eventually becoming universal in the twentieth century.

Chvojka neatly divides his chapters into four different eras by centuries: the sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. Within these chapters he typically makes three divisions based on his source material: demographic sources, so-called "qualitative" sources consisting of diaries and memoirs, and "normative" sources, consisting of visual and literary images of grandparents. His organization certainly makes it easy for the reader to navigate his argument, but also has the effect of making the book overly choppy and compartmentalized, as the many divisions break up the narrative. These divisions seem to imply falsely that these different sources stand at odds with each other, rather than as an integrated whole.

The demographic data demonstrates the paucity of children with grandparents in the early modern period, and how lower marriage ages and increasing life spans resulted in progressively higher percentages of children with grandparents from the eighteenth century to the present day. Through the qualitative data of "ego documents," Chvojka provides a look into the everyday world of the family. These documents effectively tell how grandparents became more involved in family holidays, for example taking on a special role in the nineteenth century as well-wishers at their grandchildren's birthday parties. Chvojka almost exclusively utilizes published rather than archival diaries and memoirs to narrate the new status achieved by grandparents, a choice that weakens his case somewhat as these sources tend to come from exceptional rather than ordinary individuals.

Paintings and lithographs emerge as the most effective sources for the changing role of grandparents in this book. Chvojka examines how family portraits began to create a special place for grandparents, and how the many mass-produced images in family publications like Die Gartenlaube increasingly portrayed a sentimental and emotional role for grandparents. Although he also treats portraits and other forms of painting, his interpretation of the popular prints provides the best and most original evidence for his argument.

In fact, Chvojka's assembly of such a diverse array of sources stands as perhaps the book's greatest strength, especially the popular visual sources that present such rich images from the nineteenth century. Chvojka succeeds as well in providing a better understanding of how family structures changed by concretely demonstrating the rarity of three-generation households until the point at which they were supposed to be disappearing, according to the common narrative of linear, industrialized change. Above all, his narrative successfully explains the non-progressive changes in family sizes. For example, he effectively uses demographic data from Vienna between the wars, when housing shortages, untimely deaths, and general economic malaise actually increased the numbers of three generation households, especially among the working class.

Although the author uses demographic data well, this data alone fails to ascertain the causes of the shifts in the grandparent role. Chvojka spends only a little bit of space linking the new emotional role for grandparents to the Enlightenment, and does so in extremely vague terms. Just because more elderly people were alive, it certainly did not determine that their role would be seen as a benevolent one. Rather, one might expect the elderly to be resented as non-productive people siphoning off valuable social resources, and Chvojka does not have an explanation as to why this likely response did not transpire. The more emotional role for grandparents has its roots in the cultural as well as demographic changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it is these cultural changes that require much more historical examination, both from the author and historians of the family in general.

Additionally, Chvojka overextends himself by making universal claims about changes in Western Europe as a whole, rather than just in Central Europe. In the preface he maintains that he concentrated on Central Europe, but in the course of the book he uses material from Britain, France, and Italy. The book's wide geographic scope does not negate his general argument, but it fails to provide for national, regional, and especially religious variations in the family. As Theodore Zeldin showed in his massive history of the French passions, the French tended to take a much less sentimental view of the family than the British or the Germans.[2] Variations and differences of this kind needed to be discussed.

Although a long historiographical lineage of historicizing the family already exists, historians of the family will find this book useful in its unique treatment of the place of grandparents. However, this book probably will not hold much interest for those outside of the field of the history of the family, except perhaps those interested in the popular visual sources of the nineteenth century, as the appendix contains several interesting color and black and white reproductions. Nevertheless, Die Geschichte der Grosselternrollen provides yet another cogent example of the family as a historical entity subject to alteration, rather than the unchanging, eternal institution that so many current politicians purport to defend.

Notes

[1]. Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1977); and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

[2]. Theodor Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Ambition, Love, and Politics. Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 286-287.

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Citation: Jason Tebbe. Review of Chvojka, Erhard, Geschichte der Großelternrollen vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9942

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