Abstract
The German right-wing populist party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) opposes diverse family lifestyles by promoting the return to a family model of father, mother, and children. This “Narrative of Return” paves the way for the party’s anti-gender, anti-childlessness, and anti-immigration agendas. This article examines how narratives about families as promoted by the AfD reflect or address experiences of the post-socialist transformation in East Germany. It turns out that Narratives of Return (NoR) overlook the elderly as acting individuals and disregard the ways they engage with their families and how they continue to organize their lives autonomously in old age. NoR instead depict older people as an anonymous group of supposedly undeserving pensioners, who benefit from society and family without having any function in them. However, discourses on care for the family can be traced down to a micro-level that confirms how care for the family is, in fact, care for older people. The article presents two selected life stories of advanced-age East Germans to substantiate this claim. The life stories reveal that older people themselves believe in various notions of family, despite being served with NoR in the recent past. Experiences in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) even seem to prevent older people from again falling for totalizing schemes that order and prescribe uniform (family) experience. Consequently, it is not to be expected that NoR will succeed in closing discourses on care for the family easily.
Such suffering can be witnessed [. . .] when older people have lived together in a family, where [there were] young people, grandchildren. And then Oma [grandma] or Opa [grandpa] was put in a nursing home. Their personalities deteriorated within a very short time. People do not talk about it, but that is a problem. How can we develop these family values, how do we create this togetherness, the family. That is a big question.
About the Evolution of NoR in East Germany
A discourse related to Narratives of Return (NoR) surfaced in East Germany in the early 2010s, when a new right-wing populist party, “Alternative for Germany” (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), gained momentum. Its primary goal is the “preservation of the nation,” 1 which is to be achieved through the return to a traditional family model of father, mother, and children, thus openly making use of NoR. In these particular narratives, the “traditional” is identified exclusively with the form of a proper family that is assumed to have both socially productive and nationally reproductive functions. The AfD in East Germany does indeed promote such a family model.
The party depicts itself as an anti-establishment party, opposed to the political and social principles of the elected government. Therefore, all the other parties represented in parliament have so far vehemently rejected forming coalitions with AfD. 2 The German domestic intelligence services, expected to “ensure the protection of the free, democratic basic order,” 3 treat it as a “suspected threat,” a label reserved for suspected extremist incidents or organizations, which (since 2022) actually allows them to intercept the party’s phone calls and email correspondence. 4 In East Germany, the AfD has so far achieved votes that are on average twice as high as in West Germany. 5 The party’s electoral success thus coincides, at least in spatial terms, with the five so-called new states of Germany that belonged to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) until October 1990.
Saxony, where I have been conducting my fieldwork for the past two years, is one of these five states, and, as the political scientist Steffen Kailitz states, it “has been a central arena for the [AfD’s] increasing radicalization and extremization.” 6 However, the AfD did not start out as an East German party but became one. Among its founders were former members of established center-right parties, such as the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Germany or the Free Democratic Party (FDP), who were dissatisfied with the process of European integration and, not least, critical of how “in the years of [Angela] Merkel as chairperson of CDU, the party modernized its policies on women, family, and immigration.” 7
Though originating as an “anti-euro party,”
8
characterized by the journalist Melanie Amann as a group of “the disappointed, the economically liberal and the national-conservatives,”
9
the AfD soon grew popular among the right and extreme right. The political scientist Herfried Münkler concluded that
the AfD has shifted significantly to the right and, especially in eastern Germany, has become a political reservoir for people who had previously been indifferent or openly hostile to the political spectrum. At the same time, the AfD set in motion a migration from the left to the right, in which primarily those who had long had a distanced attitude toward liberal democracy took part.
10
The AfD had its political breakthrough in the state elections of 2014 in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Thuringia—that is, three of the five new states in East Germany—where
the AfD’s national-conservatives and national populists have their strongest base. [. . .] These state elections of 2014 marked a clear turning point for the AfD. They paved the way for the radicalization of the party and its strong shift to the right.
11
When the Merkel administration admitted hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan about a year later, the AfD turned from the “one-issue party” 12 that it had been in the very beginning (with the one issue being Euroscepticism) into an “anti-immigration party.” 13
In the federal elections of 2017, the AfD first entered the Bundestag (with 12.6% of the votes, i.e., 94 of the 709 available seats). 14 Moreover, an East–West divide became evident in these elections: while the AfD achieved 10.7 percent of the votes in the West, with 21.5 percent it came second after the CDU in the East, and even first in the state of Saxony (with 27%), “pushing the CDU to second place after leading the [Saxonian] state government since 1990.” 15 This did not affect the Saxonian state government legitimized by the 2014 elections, and the coalition formed by the CDU and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) stayed in place there. Nonetheless, notions of the AfD as an East German party solidified subsequently.
Voting AfD was interpreted as the “late revenge of the East,” which likewise translated into “an expression of protest, frustration, and disillusionment with the West German-dominated system that undervalues eastern Germans and even neglects them.” 16 Jennifer Yoder explains that feeling undervalued during the post-socialist transformation indeed led to disillusionment with everything that was merely “imported” or “transplanted” from the West. She argues that “skepticism of elite-led politics and of parties more generally can be understood as both a legacy of the Communist past and as a result of a particular mode of transition to democracy and capitalism.” 17 Of course, strong inferences about people’s voting behavior cannot necessarily be made on the basis of separate elements of such (East–West) narratives. There might be other factors at play, about which we do not know. Nevertheless, these narratives invariably inform public debates about electoral behavior in East Germany.
Both public and academic debates reflect a certain simultaneity of the AfD and NoR appearing in Germany. This does not imply, however, that a return to traditional family models and values goes hand in hand with the AfD’s electorate only. Until only recently, more than 30 percent of older German adults (aged forty-six to eighty-five years) preferred the CDU over other political parties, thus opting for a family policy in favor of marriage and parenthood. This preference did not differ by gender and even increased with age (to 45 percent among the adults aged seventy-six to eighty-five years in 2017). 18 Together, these age groups represent more than half of the entire population. 19 A considerable percentage of Germans thus approved of a rather conservative family policy, or as the CDU proclaimed, a policy in which “family and children are part of a happy life for the vast majority of women and men in our country.” 20 Therefore, discourses on care for the family must be seen in a broader context than this article can provide when focusing on NoR as promoted by the AfD. After all, election results only inadequately represent the social reality of families.
In this article, I suggest that the closer we look at individual lifestyles, the more diverse family lifestyles will appear to us. To confirm this assumption, I first explore the ways in which the AfD in East Germany makes use of NoR. Since the AfD emerged only after the year 2013 and has since then not been governing, about twenty-five years of post-socialist transformation seems to have passed without NoR resonating among East Germans. Therefore, I touch upon the following questions: What characterizes NoR as post-socialist (if anything at all)? If NoR indeed did not have a great appeal for post-socialist society, to what extent, then, have they been relevant to people’s lifeworlds or family lives? In what narratives about families do people believe while (or regardless of) being served with NoR in the recent past?
Furthermore, I contrast the master narrative of NoR with micro-narratives and individual experiences of family in post-1989 East Germany. I bring up a segment of older people whom I find to be completely overlooked, first in such narratives, and second in research on such narratives. Most appropriately, it was older people themselves who prompted me to look closer and not to overlook them again. NoR, I will argue, do not appeal to them. Rather, their experiences in the former GDR prevent them from again falling for totalizing schemes that order and prescribe a uniform (family) experience.
The article is based on life story interviews with advanced-age East Germans who have been actively contributing to a discourse on care for the family. They did so rather unconsciously by taking care of older persons in their towns, neighborhoods, or houses, some of them since well before 1989. In the interviews, they revealed very surprising notions of care and along these lines also of family, which did not conform with the idea of the former GDR as a welfare dictatorship (with the state responsible for everyone) before 1989, nor the return to a traditional family model (with only individuals responsible for their family proper) after 1989.
My interviewees pointed out that care for the family is, in fact, also care for older people. Following this line of thought, I will have a closer look at how older people are treated, if mentioned at all, in NoR promoted by the AfD in East Germany. My hypothesis is that there is no place for older people as acting individuals in NoR, which contradicts both the many ways older persons engage with their families and how people continue to organize their lives autonomously in old age.
NoR in AfD’s Family Policy
Today, the AfD has to some extent departed from the thematic canons typically used by the extreme right, staging itself more and more as a “family party.” 21 As such, it opposes feminism, as well as so-called gender ideology and diverse family lifestyles. Juliane Lang has identified several elements on which the AfD founded this profile: family populism, a supposedly natural order of the sexes, a myth of early sexualization of children, and the devaluation of homosexuality. 22 NoR and anti-gender campaigning are thus at the core of the AfD’s political agenda. After all, the AfD has become “the most successful radical right populist party in the Federal Republic of Germany,” and it cannot be denied that, to some extent, the AfD’s conception of family made “the electoral fortune of this party [. . .] clearly very different from that of its radical right populist precursors.” 23 Let us therefore have a closer look at what family signifies.
Apparently, most people can agree on the benefits a family offers to its members: a feeling of belonging and closeness, a joint structure of everyday life, protection (or at least support) in case of physical or emotional harm, understanding, mutual aid and guidance in life, and, not least, the idea that there is someone taking care of you (if only materially). For most, family comes along with certain immaterial values and narratives that are passed on in the family line, providing us with a means for orientation outside the family. In that sense, the family is one of the places where we learn how to tell right from wrong and how to build social relations, ultimately, to be able to integrate into the society surrounding us.
Where (or rather when?) was it that we left these common grounds, and that our narratives about families split into two scenarios, one returning to a supposedly traditional family model of the 1950s, while the other opted for family in its broadest possible sense, including, for example, same-sex relationships, foster children, or live-in caregivers? The latter scenario obviously agrees with the idea that family may consist of father, mother, and child. At the same time, however, it acknowledges that there are a lot of other possible constellations. In any case, not every family consisting of a father, a mother, and a child automatically represents traditional values, as suggested in NoR.
The 2021 election program of the AfD stated “the AfD is committed to the family as the nucleus of our society. It consists of father, mother, and children. Family means security, care, home, love, and happiness. This system of values and references is passed on from generation to generation.” 24 The statement creates an entirely positive image of the family, which is presented as an unquestionable and traditional institution, associated with beneficial social relations between parents and their children and suited to evoke childhood memories, when we all felt happy and safe. “Security” is even the first mentioned value in the declared family “system of values.” The phrasing and style of this statement (which can be considered as representative of the election program as a whole) aim to achieve clarity and simplicity, conveying the idea of someone talking common sense. It should not go unmentioned that the URL leading to this statement is optimized for the use of search engines and consists of only three keywords (election program-family-children), which quite subtly reinforces the idea that narratives strongly influence our voting behavior. 25
One of the central claims here is that family values are “passed on from generation to generation,” meaning that what a family is and does has to some extent already been defined in the past. From this, it follows that only those brought up in a “proper” family are qualified to know and to contribute to the implicit “system of values” passed on to future “generations.”
There is no specific point of time mentioned to which AfD aspires a return, yet public discourse locates it in the 1950s. Bettina Hoffmann, a member of the German Green Party, stated that the AfD advocates “an image of women from the previous century.” 26 The journalist Simone Rafael added, “they actually want the fifties back.” 27 The AfD emerged only in the most recent decade of the “long history of the Wende [transition],” a term introduced by the historian Kerstin Brückweh that explores the long-lasting implications of the post-socialist transformation in East Germany. 28 In the broadest sense of this term, AfD may be thus understood as a post-socialist phenomenon. The party strives for a family model that was not cultivated in the socialist GDR, but is rather opposed to the industrialized and depatriarchalized socialist family model. In other words, NoR appear here with at least an implicitly known point of return predating the foundation of the GDR in 1949. At the same time, the AfD seems to refer to much more recent times that are closely interlinked with the experiences of the post-1989 transformation and its results. Without determining a further point of return, the AfD leaves it to our imagination to decide with which ideal past we associate the “traditional” family.
Remembering the past as something good and worth returning to is not a unique feature of NoR. According to the social psychologist Harald Welzer, we rather remember the past in ways that help us find orientation in the present and the future. Doing so, we even alter unpleasant memories to pleasant ones, if that makes more sense in narrating our life stories today (this is an unconscious process called “narrative inversion”). 29 My point is that remembering the family of the 1950s as something good does not necessarily denote approval of NoR, but is probably an outcome of reminiscing about the past in general.
In the East German case, however, approving of NoR about a traditional family of the 1950s sounds exceptional. Historians and social scientists have likewise reached the conclusion that a particular East German identity formed after 1989. 30 This identity is more rooted in the GDR, where the establishment of a state-socialist order in the early 1950s prevented the concept of a traditional family from asserting itself as it did in West Germany. Not only were women encouraged to join the socialist workforce (admittedly in addition to their reproductive work) but they were also accepted as single people or mothers with extramarital children. The social scientists Hana Hašková and Christina Klenner explain that, especially in East Germany, “the absence of a male breadwinner in female-headed single-parent families after the Second World War [. . .] and the ideology of women’s emancipation through their lifelong fulltime employment played a role in diminishing the male breadwinner model.” 31 One could thus argue that gender roles were thoroughly realigned in the GDR either to meet the socialist ideal of dual-breadwinner families or to open up for more diverse family models. Not surprisingly, the number of divorces in the GDR doubled from 1960 to 1989 (from 24,500 to 50,000 divorced couples), and the number of nonmarital relationships increased. 32
Even before the fall of Communism, working women in East Germany were thus believed to be more emancipated than housewives in the West, although this narrative was more than once challenged as merely an “emancipation from above” common everywhere in the Eastern Bloc. 33 In addition to that, responsibilities for child care and care for older people were gradually removed to state facilities at the time, allowing women more economic independence (at least in terms of the official rhetoric). Stereotypes about how family behavior changed under state socialism due to women’s new economic status still persist in society. Historical research and gender studies, however, have discussed women’s double and triple burdens, 34 confirming that a gendered division of labor and care work remained to some extent unchanged. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the discourse on care for the family picked up on this argument once more, even producing, in the words of Andreas Chatzidakis, “discursive explosions of care.” 35
Nevertheless, the experience of forty state-socialist years seems to set East Germany apart from West Germany up to today, particularly when it comes to family-related behavior. For instance, “parenthood and marriage are more strongly coupled in West Germany than in East Germany.”
36
While most couples in West Germany get married before their first child is born, from the early 1970s on, an increasing number of extramarital children has been recorded in East Germany. The sociologist Michaela Kreyenfeld concludes that
with the German reunification and the transfer of the Federal German social policies to East Germany, it was expected that the unusually high proportion of non-marital children in East Germany would quickly be reduced to the West German level. In fact, the East German non-marital rate continued to rise. Even among the cohorts that started families only after the “Wende,” there are large differences in the importance of non-marital parenthood.
37
This is of course only one example, which I find suitable to illustrate how the East–West divide continues to occupy demographic research, political debates, and public discourses in Germany. Many more examples and narratives have been discussed in detail elsewhere. 38
Among those who vote for the AfD today, the sociologist Cornelia Koppetsch states,
there are disappointed family breadwinners, not all of whom come from the lower classes and who see themselves disappointed in their role models of the family breadwinner and the self-evident expectations of the privileges that arise from them, either because they are no longer sole breadwinners or because women can now manage quite well on their own and this function of the family breadwinner has been devalued.
39
In Saxony, the AfD recruits most votes among middle-aged men, that is, people who are in the midst of the “breadwinner stages” of their lives. Correspondingly, the fewest votes are gained from people above seventy years of age, who literally went into retirement from such functions. 40 This is crucial to know, because those over seventy years account for about 22 percent of eligible voters in federal elections (and the number is growing), and they also have higher voter turnout rates than younger age groups. 41 It is also interesting to note here that East Germany has an overall higher proportion of people over the age of sixty-five years (27 percent) than Western Germany (22 percent). Considering that residents of East Germany tend to be relatively old, it is surprising that the AfD does not specifically recruit voters in this age group and that older people apparently rarely vote for the AfD. 42 NoR, as I suggest in this article, do play a certain role in these election results, as does aging, of course.
While leaving the concrete point of return unclear, the AfD’s 2021 election program suggests very clearly that today’s families are endangered from within: “From the left-green side, the institution of the family is being discredited for ideological reasons in order to replace it with other models.” 43 This “threat” is further elaborated by the AfD, arguing that “a continuation of the prevailing, family-destroying policies will further exacerbate the demographic catastrophe into which we have fallen. At the end of this process, there will also be the collapse of social security systems and ultimately of our cultural identity.” 44 The message is very clear: family is good, it is currently under threat and therefore, it must be protected. Words such as “catastrophe” or “collapse” are employed to strengthen this message. As we can see here, the AfD deliberately uses NoR to pave the way for its anti-gender, anti-childlessness, and anti-immigration agendas.
Overlooked and Undeserving—Older People in NoR
When referring to demographic developments (a population declining in East Germany since the 1950s, and in West Germany since the turn of the millenium 45 ), the AfD does not address the aging population at all. Considering how obsessed the AfD is with the control of demographic trends, this is very surprising. 46 As we have seen above, the AfD warns about “the demographic catastrophe into which we have fallen” 47 to encourage married couples to have (more) children. The bottom line is that growing numbers of older people present a problem in society. Why, then, are they not integrated into the AfD’s political agenda?
In its 2021 election program, AfD suggested that there is a “system of values” which is being passed on from generation to generation. There is, however, no conception of who the older generation is, or how the older generation is in touch with the younger ones. 48 Neither does the aspirational family model of father, mother, and children give any information on the role of older family members, but instead it focuses on the supposedly young and strong, for instance, mothers (not grandmothers) and the working (not the retired).
The AfD speaks of retirement pensions only (if at all) to reinforce its position on childlessness. The 2021 election program hence stated the following:
Families deserve special attention in the social security system. Parents bear the burden of raising children. However, children’s later benefits, especially from pension insurance, benefit all pensioners, including those without children. Families with children therefore bear special burdens for the society as a whole.
49
According to this statement, the AfD deems that only those are worthy of receiving retirement pensions who first “bear [the] burdens” of having children before turning into pensioners who only “benefit” from society. Life courses are basically reduced to two stages of adulthood: a productive stage of work and family life that is devoted to giving, followed by a stage of old age that is devoted to receiving. This oversimplification suggests that society can be divided into the burdened deserving and the undeserving beneficiaries, rhetoric typical for right-wing populist parties, also in other post-socialist countries. With regard to east-central Europe, in particular Hungary and Poland, the anthropologist Don Kalb identified a “culture-talk of deservingness and un-deservingness” that contributed to the making of an illiberal right.
50
The sociologist Till Hilmar examined deservingness as a matter of “economic memories” in the post-socialist transformation of the Czech Republic and East Germany.
51
He found that
deservingness is embedded in historical consciousness. [. . .] It is effectively abandoned only by introducing narrative, or eventful knowledge about constraints to individual agency, and thus by contextualizing a person’s capability for making choices and taking advantage of opportunities at the time.
52
These findings confirm a connection between right-wing populism and deservingness, on one hand, and deservingness and post-socialism on the other. The AfD apparently fits into that scheme. Indeed, family politicians of the AfD suggested in May 2019 that “a good example of an activating family policy could be the Hungarian government under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.” 53
NoR, as presented above, center around children and marriage as the essential elements of family. It is most astonishing, however, that they do so without mentioning aging or old age. Pensioners are taken as a given but are not explicitly planned for. From the AfD’s election program alone, one might even get the impression that pensioners are a uniform and quite anonymous group of people without (gender) roles, without functions in society, and without responsibilities for others at all. Notions of “the undeserving retired” are actually not a new phenomenon, but have been observed since the 1970s, for example by the historian Adrian Grama for the case of socialist Romania. 54 They do certainly counter the previous narrative of pensioners as celebrated veterans of work in the GDR, “who have already made their contribution to the construction of socialism and therefore have the right to be taken care of either by the state or by society.” 55
Apparently, the AfD tries to reinforce the image of “the undeserving retired,” thereby striking a nerve in collective memory: the pension system of the GDR, which was primarily intended to provide a minimum level of security, was replaced by the wage- and contribution-based federal German pension system after German unification in 1990. Through this so-called pension transition act, millions of former GDR citizens were integrated into the pension system of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). 56 The entire process left some with the impression that East German pensions were being paid out unjustly at the expense of West Germans. Several of my interviewees who entered retirement shortly before 1989 stressed throughout our encounters how much they had worked for their pensions. More than thirty years after the “Wende,” narratives of undeserved pensions obviously still bother them. The AfD makes use of such resentments in its 2021 election program.
Since everyone will grow old one day, disregarding older people in demographic discourse is utterly illogical. It is even more so as family is a term that applies no matter what age someone has. We cannot grow out of our familial ties by growing old. Likewise, gerontologists describe aging as a topic that is constantly updated:
It occupies the politics of society in an almost ubiquitous manner. Hardly any discourse is conducted without reference to demography. [. . .] Demographic change is highly complex and intertwined with other mega-trend issues, such as family, gender, migration, social engagement, labor markets and productivity, space and settlement.
57
In contrast to this, NoR consider aging mainly when it comes to care, cure, or provisioning for children, which are all allegedly threatened by it. In this way, family is again reduced to parent–child relationships, whereas aging appears as a violation of the “natural order of things” rather than a process that concerns everyone. The AfD thus reinforces a dichotomy of parents versus the childless and further sorts people into the supposedly “deserving young” and “undeserving old.” 58
Following this line of thought, I conclude that there is no place for older people as acting individuals in NoR. It remains unclear what happens to the members of a family when they grow old. NoR make no mention of older mothers, older fathers, or grandmothers and grandfathers, although they would at least meet the prime category of having (had) children. One could go so far as to understand this as a vague kind of ageism.
Another question I would like to pursue here is why East German NoR apparently differ from those in their immediate eastern neighborhood. In the Czech Republic, the sociologist Radka Dudová observed that “the state gave priority to family-based elderly care” in the 1990s, and that “the opinion that formal care services should only be used if there are no [. . .] family members, to provide care” is today widely shared.
59
This development built on conservative family values that the Czechoslovak welfare state had already reintroduced after 1968.
60
In post-1989 Poland, the older generation in particular stated that “receiving formal care (especially institutional care) reflects a lack of loyalty to traditional family patterns and values.”
61
This attitude comes as no surprise, Stanisława Golinowska explains, because up till then
It was commonly accepted that the responsibility for caring for a person in the final stages of their life was the task of his or her family. [. . .] The tacit assumption that [it is] the family who should provide care for dependent elderly did not undergo a significant change in the years 1990–2010.
62
Golinowska even concludes that “In a conservative traditional society, [. . .] there is support for and an expectation of family care perceived as a moral obligation.” 63
Both countries today register the highest share of informal care for older people, that is, care provided by family members, in the European Union. 64 In East Germany, in contrast, processes of familialization did not lead the way, and care for older people instead quickly adapted to West German models of private for-profit care. 65 Although not elaborated in this article, we must of course be aware that debates during the “conservative and free market revolution of the 1980s” in the West (e.g., in the United States) also revolved intensely around family values. 66
As we have seen, NoR promoted by national conservative discourses either overlook older people or indeed disregard them intentionally. In its 2021 election program, the AfD envisioned older people as undeserving beneficiaries of “proper” family behavior, suggesting that only married couples with children make sure that the state can pay their retirement pensions. If NoR are the minority view at the moment, what narratives are the majority view, then? What narratives on families do the older people themselves advocate? Let us approach these questions with the aid of concrete examples.
Narratives on Families in Life Story Interviews
It is not the purpose of this article to sort those who do (and do not) vote for the AfD into groups. Instead, I presume that promoters of NoR, which I identify among AfD members and their counterparts, contribute to contemporary discourses on care for the family in East Germany. To better understand how people think and feel about family, it is necessary to talk to them. I take a step in this direction, although the interviews to which I refer below were not designed for that purpose. When conducting life story interviews in East Germany, I originally had in mind to find out why older people voluntarily took care of other older people. I did not ask my interviewees about their families. It turns out, however, that NoR indeed underlie some of the topics most central in my interviews, for instance, social relations, gender roles, chances in life, voluntary action, working life, retirement, and friendship. Therefore, in the following passage, I reconsider two of the life stories that explicitly confronted me with narratives about families.
Reconsidering individual life stories with their inherent family biographies makes sense methodologically. The approach allows me to trace narratives about families to the micro-level. It draws attention to the questions of where narratives on families come from in the first place, what personal (or historical) events or breakthroughs reinforce them, and how they are processed in autobiographical memory. The psychologist Robyn Fivush describes autobiographical memory as a “form of memory that moves beyond recall of experienced events to integrate perspective, interpretation, and evaluation across self, other, and time to create a personal history.” 67 Following up on this, I believe that rereading my interviews will shed light not only on conceptions of family and aging but also on the social organization of a society transforming from socialism to post-socialism, as well as the transformation experiences that accompanied this process in East Germany.
I also build on research findings of the ethnologist Silke Meyer, who explains that life story interviewing goes beyond everyday communication. It rather generates narratives that are “organized by plot and culturally recognizable patterns” and turn “a sequence of events into a meaningful story” that attributes “roles to their protagonists and thereby position[s] their authors within a social group or society rather than simply carrying information.” 68 Accordingly, I understand my life story interviews as sources that can give us valuable insights into East German narratives about families (even over a longer period of time). Incidentally, the life story interviews given here were conducted in Saxony in the years 2020–2022 and therefore contextualize both the 2021 German federal elections (with the AfD garnering nearly 25% of the votes in Saxony 69 ) and, of course, the ongoing COVID-19-pandemic.
What notions of family can be found in these individual life stories? Are they in any way informed by post-socialist social policies? How do NoR fit into the picture? These questions will now be addressed against the background of the two life stories.
We Cannot Choose Our Family, Can We?
On a trip to the Vogtland district in Saxony in autumn 2020, I interviewed Marianne (name changed), then a ninety-two-year-old woman, a widowed mother who had worked as a police officer until German unification in 1990. I originally approached her to find out more about how she voluntarily took care of other older people. As she had been very actively organizing meals, household assistance, and all kinds of gatherings for senior citizens in her district in the early 1990s, she was definitely informed about work with older people. On top of that, as it turned out, she possessed a unique understanding of family. Right at the beginning of the interview, she puzzled me with the following statement:
I do have a family, we had big family reunions every year with excursions, and I looked everywhere to see where there was something nice, I looked everywhere to see if there were restaurants that could accommodate 40 people. [. . .] Because my mother had died, my son had moved out by then, the organization was my family. Until now. And also the coffee afternoons, they took place every Wednesday. From then until today, every Wednesday. When we were in the big room, it was nice because they always baked and cooked, and people came every Wednesday. We even [organized] the golden wedding anniversary of one of them. That was really nice. Heartily among each other, so there [. . .] I was well-known and befriended, and there we even [celebrated] Christmas together.
70
During the course of the interview, I began to realize that Marianne used “family” and “organization” as interchangeable terms. How did she arrive at that? She indeed had had a family in the narrow sense: she has been married (her husband died in the mid-1980s) and has a son. Moreover, she had an elderly mother, whom she took care of by herself, until the mother (only a short time after the husband) died. In the early 1990s, Marianne reached retirement age herself and decided to take over responsibilities in a local welfare organization in which her husband had been involved earlier. When looking back on the activities in that organization, Marianne not only used the organization’s name where others might have spoken of family but also explicitly pronounced that “the organization was [her] family.”
I go deeper into the connection of volunteering and care elsewhere. 71 What I want to draw attention to here, however, is that committing herself to an organization to some extent substituted for Marianne’s need to care for her family. In fact, not having a family to care for (at least not on a daily basis, as her son was grown up and leading his life independently by then) led Marianne to choose a new framework of caregiving. This framework had a striking resemblance to her family life of the 1980s: her family of choice, too, had concrete members, who had regular “reunions.” They undertook vacation-like “excursions” together, went to restaurants, or celebrated typical family events, such as someone’s golden wedding. They even spent Christmas together, a holiday that is commonly reserved for the close family. Marianne welcomed her role as head of this new family and eagerly “looked everywhere to see where there was something nice,” to provide for the “family.”
In contrast to the small family she had had before, including only herself, her mother, husband, and son, the new family extended to forty people. Although these forty were all at about the same (advanced) age, thus more in the role of peers, Marianne felt responsible for everyone’s well-being. In a way, she continued acting in roles she had experienced before, that is, the role of a caregiver and provider, a mediator for common (or diverse) interests, a peacekeeper, and a life partner. A new assignment, so to speak, was to “befriend” her “family peers.”
Through the interview, I learned that Marianne had been very well integrated into the system of the GDR. She had been a member of several socialist mass organizations, apparently not only because everyone had to join an organization but out of conviction. She believed in the socialist work ethic, in lived solidarity and mutual aid, and proved to have profound moral values. Family was no exception. Even more, after having lost her husband and mother, and (after 1989) to which everything “socialist” she had previously committed herself, she gladly seized the first opportunity to form a family of choice according to her system of values. The lines between family behavior and organizational activities, as practiced under state socialism, blurred in the process.
The way Marianne envisaged her family in the 1990s is fundamentally different from NoR now promoted by the AfD in East Germany. Instead of accepting family as a biological, even natural unit, she was convinced that family was something one had to work for. In her personal experience, family did not come by itself, but she had to actively build it and put effort into sustaining it. Consequently, she energetically created “family reunions” and shared routines such as the get-togethers for coffee on Wednesdays. In doing so, Marianne established opportunities for shared everyday life among her family peers. Over the years, the forty family peers grew old together, continued to meet on Wednesdays, and ultimately supported each other when members of their family circle began to pass away.
The room where all the get-togethers for her family took place has changed only once in the past thirty years. It is located in the basement of a retirement home that is run by the above-mentioned welfare organization. Although there were no personal belongings, except for the photographs and documents Marianne had brought for the interview, she seemed to feel perfectly comfortable there, at home even. In contrast to NoR that assume the necessity of an entire family-friendly nation, Marianne presented this one room as sufficient for her family’s needs. It was the place where she met people with whom she was close, the place where they celebrated, ate, and drank, where they exchanged good or bad news, and where they reminisced about their lives. In other words, this room was their home of choice, and the one place where she had agency. It thus comes as no surprise that Marianne invited me to that room when I asked her for an interview, instead of inviting me to her small flat.
At the end of the interview, Marianne brought up her advanced age for the first time. She explained that she had very much enjoyed the meetings on Wednesdays until only recently:
But then it started with the hearing loss. That I no longer understood anything. We can talk now, but what do you think when [all the] people are sitting here, how that sounds.
The hearing loss condemned Marianne to a more passive role in her family. The mutual exchange a which she had previously actively participated, was no longer possible, or as she put it, she “can talk” but “no longer [understands].” It was, however, unimaginable for her to not come to the Wednesday get-together. With a little self-mockery, she told me how much she still enjoyed being there and seeing all the others. I must admit that this attitude impressed me a lot. Not only was Marianne giving her family everything she still could, but she also gave her family peers the opportunity to be there for her (in whatever ways they still could). As I was visiting her in her “home of choice,” she included me in that arrangement.
On the morning of our interview, she walked the short distance from her flat to the room, just as she was used to do. I only found out an hour after the interview had ended that she had actually fainted on the way, lost her glasses, and injured herself on the concrete when falling. As if rushing to another important family event, she had gotten up dutifully, and had not spoken about the incident until we had the interview recorded. Accordingly, this is how I interpret her life story: we can choose our family, and when we have done so, family comes first.
Family and Aging—Two Sides of the Same Coin?
As we have seen from Marianne’s life story, there are family models opposed to NoR that include older persons as acting individuals. Her case also strengthened my hypothesis that care for the family is also care for older people. I would like to follow up on this with another example. I come back now to the statement that I already quoted at the beginning of this article:
Such a suffering can be witnessed [. . .] when older people have lived together in a family, where [there were] young people, grandchildren. And then Oma [grandma] or Opa [grandpa] was put in a nursing home. Their personalities deteriorated within a very short time. People do not talk about it, but that is a problem. How can we develop these family values, how do we create this togetherness, the family? That is a big question.
72
I met the now eighty-one-year-old speaker Manfred (name changed) on a trip to the region of Upper Lusatia (Saxony) in early 2022. He is a former pedagogue, who seized the opportunities of the early 1990s to get involved with a new political party (not the AfD) and to rebuild a welfare organization that had been prohibited in the GDR. Both commitments put him into the position of a decision-maker and a person responsible for local retirement homes. In the quoted passage of the interview, Manfred described how retirement homes needed to be transformed from state-socialist ownership into the property of the implied welfare organization. He seemed distressed with institutional care in both versions, as the idea “to put [someone] in a nursing home” countered his conception of family. Family, in his view, included “young people, grandchildren” and grandparents. Throughout the interview, he repeatedly spoke of “Oma” or “Opa” in the diminutive form instead of grandmother or grandfather. In this way, he rarely spoke of older people as a homogenous group of people but gave them more personal features and ascribed them family roles, for instance, the role of grandparents. As we have seen earlier, this contrasts with current NoR, which conceptualize older people as an anonymous group without social functions. I do not know, of course, whether the older persons in question were grandparents (or would have been happy with that role). It is, however, a decisive difference to admit that older people do have roles and family-related functions in the first place.
Moreover, Manfred suggested that individuals have “personalities” that “deteriorate” when they are ripped out of the family. He made particularly clear how fatal the consequences can be when “older people have lived within a family” for most of their lives and get handed over to institutional care only for the last stage of their lives (in which they need their families the most). As a pedagogue, Manfred used to work with teenagers who had been separated from their families. Observing how traumatic the separation from family was, also for older people, motivated him to commit particularly to care for older people in his town.
In his opinion, it is social relations within a family—namely the way family members of different generations communicate and interact with each other—that help us develop personalities and maintain a certain quality of life until old age. According to Manfred, older people especially lack opportunities for having such contacts when living in institutional care facilities.
Is the family thus a good (or an even better) place for old age? What does good aging even look like? Manfred acknowledged that these questions are indeed “big question[s]” 73 that cannot be solved individually. Rather, he reflected about a problem “people do not talk about,” 74 which is that there are many older people in our society who are (or will be) in need of our care. Manfred emphasized that he saw this as a problem for society as a whole.
From this interview, I got the impression that family and aging are two sides of the same coin. Care for the family and care for older people go hand in hand. According to Manfred, having many older people in our society means that we need to strengthen both families as caregivers and family values in society. Manfred asked explicitly, “How can we develop these family values, how do we create this togetherness, the family?” 75 —attributing to the family an (admittedly) idealized quality of togetherness.
Unlike NoR, which prescribe family values to achieve an aspired form of national reproduction, Manfred understands family values as caring values, which may be lived by everyone, not only by a defined group of people. Like Marianne, Manfred includes care for older people in care for the family. He does, however, depict older people mainly as recipients of care, which in his opinion should be provided ideally by the family. Both interviewees equally contradicted NoR by considering older people to be individuals with needs for communication, social relations, and in general a purposeful (end of) life.
Conclusion
This article aimed to illuminate narratives on families in two ways. First, it explored whether narratives on families, as currently reinforced by the AfD in East Germany, can be referred to as NoR. Not very surprisingly, this is the case. The AfD promotes the return to a traditional family model, following the example of other right-wing populist parties in east-central Europe. Although the AfD has strong election results in East Germany, it has never been among the parties that formed governing coalitions. This distinguishes the AfD from most of its east-central European counterparts.
The point in time to which the AfD aspires to return is unclear. I suggest, however, reading AfD’s family policy as a post-socialist one that seeks to annihilate state-socialist experiences, that it aims to turn (not literally return) to a family proper of father, mother, and children. This family model does not say anything about older people or about age(ing) of family members in general, but it paves the way for the AfD’s anti-gender, anti-childlessness, and anti-immigration agendas.
This is why, second, I attempted to explore the roles of older people in NoR. It turns out that the AfD does not grant them a place there as acting individuals. Rather, they are depicted as an anonymous group of “undeserving retired” who benefit from society (and family) without having any defined function in it. Older people thus have a status equal to that of the unmarried, the childless, or diverse others, whom the AfD identifies as undesirable in its vision for society. Concerning older people, I suppose that NoR are openly ageist not only in the East German case. Since this view disregards completely the many ways in which older people contribute to family lives, public discourses, and voluntary action (to name just a few of the fields I have been studying), I decided to trace down current discourses on care for the family to the micro-level. Using the example of two selected life story interviews, which I conducted in Saxony (East Germany) from 2020 to 2022, I demonstrated that there exist multiple narratives on families. Apparently, the closer we dare to look, the more diverse the narratives on families get.
The two individual life stories depict family as a valuable institution with a decisive influence on how people grow old in our society. In contrast to NoR, they emphasize that care for the family is also care for older people. I conclude that NoR are indeed present in the East German discourse on care for the family, but a closer look at only two (even quite randomly chosen) life stories provides a variety of possible notions of family. In fact, the two life stories imply that experiences in the former GDR can even prevent people from falling for totalizing schemes and the idea of a prescribed, uniform family experience. This leads me to the optimistic insight that, however present NoR may be at the moment, they will not succeed in closing discourses on care for the family so easily.
