Oy vey! The Reappearance of the Nazi Eva Principle!

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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From The Sunday Times / April 1, 2007

Be a hausfrau for Germany? That's Nazi talk / 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.

Herman replied that it was dangerous to link the desire for a family 
with the darkest time in Germany's history. "During the National 
Socialist era mothers were separated from their children. It is 
absurd to make that link," she said.

Herman, once voted Germany's most popular newsreader, said her career 
ambitions began to wane when she became pregnant at 38. Last August 
she left her job on Tagesschau, Germany's most prestigious television 
news programme, to campaign.

In her first book, The Eva Principle, she argued that the failure of 
women to stay at home was leading to family breakdown and a "soulless 
society". Her views struck a raw nerve and more than 100,000 copies 
of the book were sold in 10 days.

She has failed to convince Werner Herman, her former husband. "Dear 
Eva," he wrote. "You were the one who always wanted to pursue a 
career and you were the one, not I, who did not want to have 
children. You didn't do the housework because we had a maid..."

Herman responded: "I had three marriages and one child. One marriage 
with three children would have been better."