Save Germany: Stay at Home, Mum

15 March 2007, Spiegel Online:

A new wave of anti-feminism is taking hold of Germany. Former career women-turned-housewives are spreading the word about a "new femininity" which encourages women to stay at home and embrace motherhood.

The anonymous letter makes for heartbreaking reading. "Dragging myself from job to job, I used to feel so useless. I wanted to be special but didn't know how -- I was neither fish nor flesh." For this angst-ridden career woman, salvation finally came in the full-bellied shape of motherhood. "With my husband and daughter at my side, I'm so happy and free now," she proclaims.

What sounds like a scene out of a 1950s TV sitcom is in fact a letter written to Eva Herman, the German author of the controversial bestseller "The Eva Principle" ("Das Eva Prinzip"), sub-titled "Towards a New Femininity." The principle in question rests on a series of tenets so old-fashioned they seem almost revolutionary again: Motherhood instead of emancipation, child-rearing instead of career-climbing, devoted marriage instead of egoistic self-fulfillment.

The 262 pages behind the pink cover of "The Eva Principle" are full of anti-feminist anger. Herman feels that nothing less than the survival of the country is at stake -- Germans will "die out" if women don't change their behavior, she says. She sees herself as courageously breaking a "taboo" by criticizing women's liberation ...

The country, which has the lowest reproduction rate in Europe -- the national average is 1.3 children per woman -- is urgently looking for a solution to its looming demographic crisis as the population gets older and threatens to shrink ...

September 10, 2007, Spiegel Online
TV Presenter Sacked for Praising Hitler's Family Policies:

Eva Herman, a prominent talk show host and author, has been courting controversy over the last year by saying women should stay at home and bear children. Now she has been fired by the country's premier TV network for praising Adolf Hitler's family policy.

German public broadcaster ARD has fired prominent TV presenter Eva Herman for praising Adolf Hitler's policies on promoting motherhood.

Herman, 48, who has stirred controversy over the last year by calling on women to have children rather than focus on their careers, had referred to the Nazi era during a news conference last week to promote her new book on child-rearing:

"It was a gruesome time with a totally crazy and highly dangerous leader who led the Germans into ruin as we all know. But there was at the time also something good, and that is the values, that is the children, that is the families, that is a togetherness -- it was all abolished, there was nothing left," Herman said.

The program director for ARD's northern division Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), Volker Herres, said Herman had been sacked with immediate effect. "Frau Herman is free to carry on her 'motherhood crusade', but this is no longer compatible with her role as an NDR TV presenter."

He said guests had been cancelling their appearances on Herman's talk show in response to her public statements on motherhood.

Herman was a newsreader for the network's flagship "Tagesschau" program for 18 years until last year. She has also hosted several other regional talk shows and incensed feminists with her 2006 bestseller "The Eva Principle" in which she argued that Germans would die out if the nation's women don't change their ways.

While presenting her new book "The Noah's Ark Principle -- Why We Must Save the Family") last week, she was quoted as saying: "Values such as family, children and motherhood, which were also promoted in the Third Reich, were subsequently abandoned by the 1968 generation." ...

Herman told Bild newspaper on Monday that she couldn't understand what the fuss was about. "I expressly distanced myself from the 'Third Reich' at several points. One has to put my statement into its overall context. This isn't about Hitler's values, but about basic human values, which were abused in the 'Third Reich' and later abolished."

"that is a togetherness -- it was all abolished, there was nothing left". And that is the reason we're in this diversity dilemma of today. The mother-of-all over-reactions abolished all togetherness in the name of non-discrimination. Even today, "expressly distanced" is not far enough. The baby is still thrown out with the bathwater.