The disenfranchised Father [1]

About the feminist power of mothers, and the use of children as trumps in the Gender War

By Matthias Matussek
Translated by Walter H. Schneider
(German Version: "Der entsorgte Vater" with additional german links)

DER SPIEGEL, Volume 47/1997, November 17, 1997 (See also the article: "Men are the Losers”)

The expected collapse comes on the fourth day of the hunger-strike in front of the Kreuzberg Family Law Courts Building. The bald-headed man experiences loss of vision, his blood pressure drops off, skin-eruptions appear, a wave of despair breaks over him. The emergency-response doctor stabilizes and settles him down. That's what it is like when the body becomes the battlefield.

The next day, Guenter Gempp sits again in front of the Court Building with the sculpture of dice, that lies so straight and ensuring normality in the sun like an unshakable promise of justice. The social worker on hunger strike is no fanatic. He does not want to overturn the State, does not want a new world order. All he wants is to see his children Sarah and Fabian again. That's what the mother is denying him since she left him. That she is able to do that is thanks to the Courts, such as that in front of which Gempp holds his vigil.

A man who suffers from the separation from his children? Odd number, close to the edge of loser-mentality, no demand in the trade. "What is there to be done,” says a judge, who with humble carelessness strolls past him. "Are we supposed to get the Police to bring the children to him?”

Moreover-the mother's refusal is not only judicially acceptable, but also socially as well: Female Power!

Therefore Gempp is on hunger strike, against the State, against justice, against God and the World, a sinister freak like Michael Kohlhaas [a historic civil rights figure], alone against all.

It's remarkable, because Gempp represent a multitude. There are about one million fathers of separation in Germany. Their number increases by 100,000 annually. 60 percent of them won't see their children anymore after separation. Certainly, irresponsible men who don't want to care are amongst them. However, there is also an unnoticed growing host of despairing fathers, who, loved no longer and being discarded relationship-debris, at best allowed to pay alimony and other than that are blotted out of their children's lives like unpersons. Disenfranchised by mothers, who according to a survey of the German Institute for Youths, deny the existence of the love that fathers have for their children, on the basis that it interferes with the upbringing of children. The fatherless society-a radical-feminist futuristic goal is quietly and slowly becoming reality.

The Public hardly notices. Mother-love has Hollywood-appeal, Father-love not. Millions cry into their hankies, when in the tear-squeezer "Not without my Daughter” mother-lioness Sally Field abducts her daughter from the care of the Iranian father. Gempp, whose children were torn from his life, at best attracts a few casual strollers to his folding table. Although his children live in the same city, for him they are far away, farther than Teheran, unreachable. No abduction was required, only a light-handed gesture by the mother "I've got the trump card.”

Angry telephone calls, a fight in the Court? Very bad, because thereby he showed that he was "hostile”. Youth offices involve themselves. Psychologists are consulted, who judge the "readiness” of the father to have contact with his children, gray-haired women's representatives in Birkenstock sandals, concerned, shake their heads.

The best, so advise the veterans, is to bleed silently and to show no concern. Gempp was not successful with that charade, because paradoxically he is exactly the type of man whom the women's movement created with much ado and fanfare: responsible, experienced with men's groups, compassionate, a father who is involved, instead of slinking away.

What is happening? Wasn't it foremost the militant women's movement which complained about the fatherless society and the disinterest of the fathers? Now it is increasingly the women who disenfranchise fathers and alienate their children? It is time to take inventory, to determine the new balance of the victims. Article 6 of the constitution states: "Every mother is entitled to the protection and welfare of the community.” Now it is high time to protect the fathers.

Gempp experiences the dark side of a society that replaced the long-term family project with the short-term fun-relationship. Our children are the victims of this amorous shift change-more and more often it is demanded of them to forget the discarded parent as a fading nothing.

However, when two years ago on Christmas Eve his common-law spouse took away the keys to their shared apartment-the equivalent to the scenario of a separation-, it was not an explosion of the popular love-scenario, out of which one would be expulsed; Gempp was the father. There was suddenly something surprisingly archaic at play, then the heart is more old-fashioned. And he knew that his children would miss him as much as he would miss them.

Gempp sought contact with them on the playgrounds, where they experienced him as a begging clown who had to accept all of the humiliations by the mother, because only as such was he tolerated for a while. Other "disenfranchised” [sic] fathers choose even more bizarre methods, such as placards in the neighborhood, to let, by-passing the contact-blockade imposed by the mothers, their children read the message: Daddy loves you.

Now Gempp sits behind piles of helplessly-angry pamphlets and flyers from the self-help-organization "Fathers' Initiative for Children Inc.,” that he joined two years ago.

Far too late, he says today. "In the mean-time every borough got women's agencies, women's shelters, women's representatives, all with government support, and for fathers there is nothing.” Most certainly no lobby in Bonn. While Gempp is on his hunger strike in Berlin, the parliament in Bonn is passing a reform to the child-custody laws that is basically a mockery of separated fathers.

Indeed, the right of the children to have contact with both parents is expressed and shared parenting for unmarried fathers is envisioned-but that can be unilaterally nullified at any time. "One wrong word,” says Gempp, "and I won't see my children anymore.”

His ex-girlfriend indulges in her omnipotence over the child, which the current legislation practically pushes into her hand, in a childish power-rush. She demands humility of her ex-partner and despises him for it and takes him along on her hell-rides of revenge and good-spirited attitudes, in irrational loopings [sic], out of which there is no escape as long as he is attached to his children and she the keeper of the golden key to them. Gempp's basic feeling: one of complete powerlessness.

By now, the discrimination against unmarried fathers in family law is uncontested. But even married men don't hold a good hand when it comes down to serious dealing. In the company of Gempp is an older, tired, badly-shaven waiter, also on hunger strike, whose wife divorced him eight years ago.

On the flyers that he distributes is a picture of his daughters, a bad copy. It looks like the picture of lost persons posters, people assumed dead. For six years now he has not seen them anymore-just once for a few hours in the court room, in the presence of a representative of the youth office.

The reason for that is supplied by the mother. To be able to keep him away from the children, she claims that her husband, who immigrated from Macedonia twenty years ago, could try to abscond with them to his homeland. Zmeyko's assurances, that all he wants is to see his daughters only occasionally, don't help him at all in this irrational spiral of allegations. And because he exploded in a telephone conversation with his daughters' teacher-she refused to give him information about their scholastic achievement-his record now shows that he is potentially violent.

Zmeyko reacts with tracts that become inexorably more shrill. He calls the proceedings of German Justice "Fashistoid” [sic]. "Any jungle society treats men more humanely.” Both, Gempp and Zmeyko, can't fight to gain their rights, rather, they can only gain points with their weakness. They resist by doubling their defeat, because "it can't get any worse at any rate.”

Decisions in Custody Hearings

The men , who one by one gather around the hunger strikers in front of the Kreuzberg Family Law Courts Building, make the impression of a sinister sect in the underground of the social bush-war. Men in leather jackets, students in suits, others in coveralls. They tangle themselves in the convoluted German of tracts, pull official decisions out of their pockets and creased photos of their children, and show above all one thing: a remarkable speechlessness. They break out in laughable misogynist tirades, pause, doubting. Remarkable preachers in the city desert, in front of the manicured lawn, in between the regular rattling of the subway and concrete planters, stammering, as if they were able to grasp only a smidgen of a hidden truth: They resist a public discourse in which they are without a chance. Always certain is only one thing; They love their children and are not allowed to see them.

They are shrill and they are gentle. One, a mountain of a man, operates the Internet Information Service "paPPa.com”, which labors to produce countervailing publicity. Another, a graduate in chemistry with nickel-framed eye glasses, involves himself in the [publication of the] periodical "Paps” [Daddy], were in nature's constraints gentle fathers are supposed to prove themselves to be better mothers. However, over all of these attempts stands in big bold letters: DEFEAT. They have to overcome a cliché that turns the real power distribution in family law up-side-down. Men are preferably considered as ruthless egoists, women as victims. At the core of it, one thing is clear: The current family laws, a good twenty years ago celebrated as the liberal social "Reform of the Century,” missed its objective, proved itself to be a machination from Hell.

It has led to egoism and therewith destroyed families, renounced fathers' rights, rewarded maliciousness, punished benevolence and literally promoted the worst in men and women. Since then it has been attempted to limit the worst damages with reforms of the reform.

In vain.

It was a law for the extreme case. Perhaps for a woman who had risked an extra-marital adventure, was found out by her husband's private investigators, and then was found to be guilty in the resulting divorce. According to the old law she would have had no entitlement to support and would as a rule have lost the right to custody. That women had to be assisted, according to the reformers. From now on she was to be divorced without the "principle of guilt.” The declaration of the "ruination" [of the marriage] suffices. The wife who's not working shall be automatically entitled to more than half of the income of the husband, for years, yes, decades, as long as she secures custody of the child..

The reform, as time-tied as bell-bottom pants and Abba-music, had been formulated in a cultural environment that revealed men as oppressors, as incapable to raise children, and at any rate, the family as a source of infection for reactionarism-it wanted to make it possible for women to escape.

It did a good job. One of the traditional female motives for enjoinment matrimony, the wish to be provided for, now became more contemporarily addressed-one dissociated it from the obligation to be loyal. Now the law provides the certainty to have a family-provider-without the provider. As a no-longer-loved Romeo he may not be the hoped-for guaranty for perpetual fulfillment and life-long joy, but, duty-bound to pay tribute he's still useful for a considerable number of years.

And he would be well-advised to fulfill all financial obligations-because only then, so report the fathers in front of the Kreuzberg Family Law Courts Building, do they have a chance to see their offspring, possibly every second weekend. Unexpectedly, the law-reformers had turned blackmail into a profitable venture-fatherly love has turned into a vein of gold. They had fashioned a law for reasoned application-and handed out gold-leafed invitations to massive abuse [of the law]. Who could resist this clearance-sale? In the last year alone, 175 550 marriages went on the rocks and broke up-a new record. Every second marriage existing in a large city is destined for divorce, most of them within the first seven years. In the large majority it is women who leave the state of matrimony. Twice as many women as men file for divorce-for the latter often a traumatic experience. I. E. Amongst the group aged 40 to 50 the suicide rate jumped by a factor of six, that's what was reported in the women's periodical "Brigitte”.

In an article in "Brigitte”, family counselor Josef Duss-von Werdt speculates: "Women are simply secure against all crises,” although the reasons for that security was mentioned only in passing in two short semi-sentences. After all, it is not the women, but the men, who with greatest probability in the case of divorce lose their children and financially bleed to death.

The "divorce-cripple” is a firm concept in the therapy-scene. He may console himself with short-lived ersatz-relationships-he is much less capable to become involved in a lasting bond, far less even to be in a position to re-marry than a divorced wife. "Men are simply the poor losers,” jeers "Brigitte”-author Vera Sandberg. Women don't always present themselves as the better losers, because the men who on their own file for divorce get to feel the fundamental might that the legislators put into women's hands: Withholding of children, economic revenge.

The movie "First Wives Club” - "The Club of the She-devils” [sic] advanced to a cult-movie, in which abandoned wives drive their husbands to ruin. In a "First-Aid Box for broken Hearts” it is currently being distributed by the "She-devil” distributorship of the Wiesbaden journalist Jasmine Kuster-complete with instructions on how to turn the ex's life into "a living Hell”. I. E.: "Social embarrassment” or "Finking at the Department of Revenue.” The counterfeit of the disloyal partner is available as a floor rag-obviously it helps the better losers to kick those whom they can't keep around any longer.

What Goethe remarked in "Fiction and Truth” ['Dichtung und Wahrheit' in the original] is still true: "The justifications of a girl for her withdrawal are always valid, those of the man never.” In spite of all the talk about equitability, that pretense exists now as before-and is consequently exploited. Namely today the "girls” are, other than at Goethe's time, armed with effective methods of sanctions for their revenge-trips.

Today it is the men who are stuck to their marriages and rather suffer Xanthippe [2] than separate. Contrary, the women, once the stewards of the family, are today far more likely to dissolve them. All victims who have emancipated themselves? That depends on your perception. There is the woman who on account of "mental cruelty” gets the divorce from her husband because, so says her attorney, he did not acquire the built-in closet for her that she had desired. "One Third of all Divorces,” so reports "Brigitte”,, "are based on trivialities.”

Twenty years after the Reform of the Century, the emancipation-motivated legislators are confronted by a totally different clientele: a non-ideological generation, formed in a society which, as historian Christian Meier describes it, "lives from the spoils of dismantling,” and in which everyone "only tries to gain what there is to be salvaged.”

The female winners from the front-line of the divorce battles indolently use the old battle-slogans of the "patriarchal Oppressors” and the new ones of the "Gaining of Authenticity through Separation,” and they know that their power-plays will bear them no negative consequences, because they can avail themselves of the established self-defense rhetoric, just as if it were a time-worn but always effective construction set.

And the children? They have become the object for speculating, with assured returns. Their mothers don't have to earn an income, they only have to lament that on account of the children they are unable to do so. The only thing they have to do is to take care that they remove the fathers as cocaregivers.

As long as they [the mothers] are in possession of the children, the men will pay. And because two thirds of them are impoverished in the mean-time, the State will do it.

A well-intentioned law, [it] couldn't have worked out any worse. It hardly brought any advantages to the already emancipated. About 40 percent of lone mothers proved after separation that over the short and long, full-time jobs and child-raising can quite well take place in unison, just like it is done by almost 80 percent of lone-fathers who are caregivers of their children. However, the immature amongst the women were encouraged through the promise of automatic awards of alimony by the legislators to impatiently escape from the family, atrophied their drive to be capable income earners and converted their children to economic hostages.

Foremost, in grandiose fashion it missed its most popular objective: that of the clean, quick separation. The judges now wade through sleaze, especially in fights over custody. Many fathers give in right from the start, and they are well-advised not to challenge the control-sovereignty of the mothers. In the leonine battle of the mother over the child every means is right, because the rumored legendary instinct of the mother bestows any wickedness with higher consecration.

The Karlsruhe justice consultant Ernst Ell estimates that "allegations of sexual abuse play a role in one of every three cases.” Often it is government-sponsored women's groups such as "White Water Inc.” [Wildwasser e. V. in the original] which suggestively help in the search of indicators against the fathers.

The allegations are freely invented in 95% of cases of custody litigation.

Examples of Maintenance Obligations

Abuse of the abuse-a universal invention and of deadly efficiency, as indicated in the most likely best-known case of a custody fight, the one of the film producer Woody Allen with Mia Farrow. Any exoneration will be bland-children are being psychologically severely damaged, fathers socially murdered.

The principle of guilt, that the law-reformers had declared abolished surges powerfully back into the court rooms. In the mean-time, violence has become an effective routine-accusation. Which judge will award the care of children to a man described as being a perpetrator of violence?

Even marital rape has become part of the routine repertoire in custody cases, as a female divorce attorney from Berlin reports-a practical accusation, because it is hardly possible to obtain the testimony of third parties, here the allegation is considered to be valid evidence.

One of her clients, according to the attorney, served her Turkish husband therewith jail and deportation. Later she confessed to her that she only wanted to take revenge. She had assumed that he was cheating on her. The children? Naturally, they remained with her.

Rarely has jurisprudence like that of the German Family Law appealed so successfully to primitive instincts, to the raging wish to destroy and soil with spite. False allegations are seldom prosecuted, to the contrary. The awarding of the right to custody speaks for rewarding them. Separated lone-mothers have secured sole custody of the child for themselves in 75 out of every 100 cases.

In Sweden, a children-friendly country with a children-friendly system of justice, shared parenting is the rule even after separation. In Germany, the child is instead an asset which women overwhelmingly secure for themselves.

Sole custody is the aspired goal of dreams in the litigation. It will guarantee, in addition to the support payments, yet another totally different advantage, namely, as feminist judicial expert Sibylla Fluegge remarks, the exclusive "Love of the child, but also the therefrom resulting power of control and domination.”

It is a desire to control, which is fed by the anxiety that the child could become attached to the father and thereby jeopardize the foundation of existence. And that expresses itself in a calculated "mother-cult”, which drives the original feminist critics up the wall.

Didn't they fight against the "reactionary” [sic] grumbling of the mothers and for an equitable distribution of the duties of child-care? Had they not fought for being liberated from children and kitchen, to be able to follow the furthering of their own careers?

It is a lone mother, a kindergarten teacher, which steps up to the folding table in front of the Kreuzberg Family Law Courts Building and speaks words of encouragement to Gempp. Later it is a female lawyer, mother of a five-year-old son, who suggests to him that he should put out a petition, to fight for actionable fathers' rights.

She is the first one who signs it. She shakes her head on account of Gempp's ex-spouse. She senses that her own liberating successes are being denounced by her, that these wailing women of the playgirl-generation became squatters in her wind-shadow, that for them the power of motherhood has become partially life-anxiety, partially a cynically used golden ticket.

Tentatively, public feminist criticism of these new mothers is mounting. "Emma”-author Uta Koenig was drowned in protests when she announced in a women's group her decision to separate herself from her husband of 18 years and to hand over to him the care of the children.

The women reacted, outraged. They just had, according to Koenig in her remarkable report, "newly discovered their mother-instinct, because it is useful as a weapon, to alienate the children from the father or to neutralize him as a "disturbance-factor.”

They excused the blockade of contact with concerned "absurdities”. One of the fathers had taken the daughter into a stuffy construction site, where a walk in the fresh air would have been so much healthier. Then he even let her drive nail into the wall. "Her thumb was completely black.”

Eventually one of the mothers burst out, loud and considerably confused: "As long as we don't have half of the power in society, we won't hand over a single piece of mother-power.”

There, it slipped out, the ugly toady word: Power. Power over the children. Power over the feelings of the faded [spouse], power as vengeance on the man and restitution for her own biography without a father.

Uta Koenig understood two things foremost: These women, as mothers, didn't "liberate themselves from the unbearable obligations under which they themselves had suffered, as daughters.” And, their "Rage against man is expressed by these women as rage against the father of the child.” They participate in victims'groups, where they practice "Self-help for more self-pity,” and refer to their "natural mother-power.” Her summary diagnosis: "Now they do all they can to sell this caricature of motherhood to their daughters.”

Before all else, this motherhood is exactingly apportioned. One child is life-style-fitting. And one child is sufficient to achieve liberation for years into the future from the need to earn a living. Thus is it that the number of single children is climbing steadily. By now one third of all families [with children] in Germany have single children.

The secret ideal: one child as teddy-bear and as Tamaguchy, that with exactly measured effort of care returns the required alimony and which provides that contribution of warmth and relational bliss which is insufficiently satisfied in the empty single's everyday life.

Psychologists, in the mean-time, speak of "de-childrenizing of childhood.” By now every fourth family lives without father. There are 1.7 million children of separation and divorce. Every year about 150,000 more are being added to that, many of them of pre-school age. About a third of all children at the time of separation are less than three years old-many women flee marriage as soon as their entitlement to alimony has arrived in this world.

Germany is not alone in this trend, and by using the example of the USA it is possible to cast an eye into the future, where only 51 percent of all children still live with both their parents. Here it is the "welfare mom” [sic] in the black ghettoes, the teenage mother of the white trailer parks who acquires with the birth of one child the right to living accommodations of her own and a modest but steady level of social assistance-socially a quite respectable career.

The fathers in America [USA] too were marginalized. There, every third father who is not entitled to custody is being denied access to his children by the mother. Still, different from here, the fatherless society has been recognized there as a catastrophe. The president appeals in every second of his public addresses on TV to treasure family values, the black reverends in the Ghettos direct the fathers to take over responsibility-and the mothers to give the fathers a chance to exercise it. American sociologist began already long ago to investigate the devastation in a fatherless society.

In the USA, fatherless families produce:

63 percent of youth suicides,
71 percent of teen pregnancies,
90 percent of run-away and homeless children,
70 percent of youths in State institutions,
85 percent of youths in prison,
71 percent of school drop-outs,
75 percent of youths in drug rehabilitation centers.

Not in the sated, paralyzed Germany, rather in Denmark they engaged in an effort to determine the value of fathers in the upbringing of children. The Copenhagen Sociological Research Institute made a comparison between lone-mothers and lone-fathers. It brought an astounding outcome. It is the fathers, to which children aged 3 to 5 years have a "less problematical relationship.”

Lone-fathers, according to the study, are more tolerant, less inclined to have attacks of rage and punish less. For children who lived with their mothers, it was vital to have generous contact with their fathers. "Children with highly involved fathers were far better stimulated, which, amongst others, was indicated by their scholastic achievements.”

Although comparably intensive research does not yet exist in Germany, and although the misery of shattered families is being openly ignored, experts here too make themselves known and sound the alarm.

Even the leftist circles are awakening. "When the family is no longer an enclosure for our chicks that is protected by moral and judicial law,” so wrote the clinical sociologist Alexander Arenberg, "then the chicks will grow into vultures.”

How can it be any other way: A society in which the parents promote the immediate gratification of demands as a vital right and-avoiding all worries-flee their relationships, breeds sad, empty and weak losers. The increased propensity of youths to commit violent crimes-it exploded by more than 100 percent during the last five years-is another echo of the spiritual and emotional decay of the generation of the parents.

The gentle society, which some theorists presumed to be somewhen outside the confines of the despised patriarchal family, miscalculated. And its strategy of avoidance is no less catastrophic.

To marginalized fathers like Gempp it must have the impact of outright derision that in large cities the size of Duesseldorf there are now initiatives which procure "temporary fathers” for lone-mothers. That is a matriarchal variant of the Lebensborn-Principle: The biological fathers are kept at bay, a State-financed father-for-rent will do. [3]

If a job, as feminist Helen Wilkinson proposes, constitutes an important "source of identity” for young women, why, so asks Gempp, do young women fight, right up to committing perjury, for the right to be allowed to remain at home and to raise their children alone, and not to the contrary to involve absent fathers so that they may gain time for their own careers?

Most of all: Why do they ignore the yearning of the child for its father? Why do they cripple their vital feeling to be loved by their fathers? The answer is bizarre: The young clinging mothers too are to the largest part victims. They are prisoners of the system, hostages of an ideological trend, seduced by the false Siren-song of the divorce-law.

They are immersed in a flourishing counseling-industry comprised of women's agencies and women's representatives. They lose their own language in the sparkling Egoism-Theology of the fad-therapists and the well-honed battle-mechanism of lawyers, revengers and sufferers, who would brand their renunciation of marginalization and persecution of men as treason against their own "emancipation.”

The shrill abuse-folklore, which nowadays has become a routine process, offers not only a socially acceptable masquerade for unscrupulous leeches, it also exerts its powerful undertow on simply irritated, assistance-seeking, reconciliation-seeking women.

Instead of steering toward conflict-resolution - and marriage-counseling, which are mandatory in other countries, they feel themselves to be challenged to swing the divorce-cudgel for the sake of self-sufficiency and to seek with resounding propaganda their advantage over emotionally brutish men.

That's when they are ready for organizations like "Forte.”

The Berlin office of the "Forte” association is a trench in the front-line of the booty-war. Busted doorbell, splotched interpretive supplies and bleak lighting over brochures that offer legal aid and karate. As is customary in the self-help subculture, "Forte” too is a drastic acronym. It stands for "Frauen ohne Recht nach Trennung und Ehe" [Women without Rights after Separation and Marriage], "A name from the initial fighting days,” says the boss, Mrs. Skrowonnek, apologizing, as if she wanted to defuse it for the uninitiated.

Men seldom find their way to here.

She is a founding member, energetic, in her seventies, who has seen and experienced everything-most of all three marriages and an "endless fight over money.” Her life: one battle against ex-spouses, whose duration permits to draw the conclusion that it did, aside from victories and defeats, fill it with meaning. Her upshot: "The dual relationship is the shittiest kind of coexistence in existence.” It is still shitty even then when the woman is the one who ended it: For 16 years she fought with her last spouse over support. She should have been getting DM 5,000 [per month]. "But he's brought me down to $3,300.” Her cold bitterness seems to shrink him to a twerp. "He wept,” she says, disgusted, "He thought that he couldn't carry the burden anymore, and he managed to get away with it.”

Others should have it better, that's the reason for the existence of "Forte.” The brochure of the association provides the script for the perfect divorce. Children and their distress are not mentioned. At best, they appear as "basis for calculation.” The pamphlet, whose printing costs were picked up by the "Senate Administration for Labor and Women,” gives away tricks [sic] for the first blow in thoroughly conspiratorial crime-thriller jargon.

As if a divorce weren't a family-tragedy, but rather a snack that should be carefully prepared, the "Forte” brochure recommends to separation-ready women not counseling, but the "securing of important documents.” Securing? "Well, yeah,” explains Mrs. Skrowonnek, "the male spouse naturally isn't always at home, he's got to go to work sometime.” Most are clueless anyway.

Important documents, according to the brochure, are foremost "pay stubs, income tax assessments of the last 2 or 3 years, proof of assets such as bankbooks, investment certificates, bank statements,” because they will form the basis according to which the expected profit share will be calculated. Because there is such a thing as men who distrust, women who are about to make the all-important first chess move are advised: "Make photo-copies of all original documents which you won't be able to remove without being noticed.”

Then, so the Senate-sponsored brochure continues still, all turns on the "securing of personal assets.” Therefore, to timely squirrel away jewelry, separate personal bank accounts, one's own deposits-after all, one is dealing with an insidious enemy.

Whomsoever reads the "Forte” brochure should, in view of the divorce rates, no longer have any illusions about holy matrimony. Men should, at the latest after the first sign of any lessening of the honeymoon bliss, begin to acquire locked cabinets for the household and at any rate perpetually keep the spouse in good spirits, in really good spirits. Keyword: Built-in closets. Better yet: Present a prepared prenuptial agreement along with the marriage proposal-before the acceptance, the haggling-as romantic as the collective bargaining of OPEC. And that is not done out of greed, but only-for rainy days in matrimony-to incite the destruction of the marriage.

The "Forte” brochure reads like an instruction manual for economic crimes. And it gives away what men are capable of in the case of divorce: "They purposely squander assets at hand,” some self-employed bring their "Enterprise into bankruptcy,” and employees "make debts,” all that to inflict harm on women. Mrs. Skrowennek can tell you all about it.

She has absolutely no compassion for men who "purposely become unemployed, to weasel out of the alimony.” That is something like self-mutilation at the front-lines. Desertion. Yuck.

Now then it is all-important to track down and obstruct the avenues of escape open to fathers who are unwilling payers. In the battle against her husband, Mrs. Skrowonnek became an expert, and her cynicism is of a divorce industry that is boiling over, which not only destroys the familiar fabric and derides virtues like loyalty and tolerance as stupidities, but puts an extreme load on the welfare-state.

In many cases, the parents who shared a sufficient family income, meet again after separation in the office of Social Services. Many families live at or below the poverty line, often with partners of who at least one is divorced and has to provide for a first family. The number of cost-of-divorce-related bankruptcies of small and medium-sized family enterprises is rapidly increasing.

The divorce laws encourage the Slash-and-Burn principle, the battle of annihilation with a view to short-term gains, without regard to the catastrophic consequential damages. How can in judicial circumstances of that kind anything be conveyed to the children other than hate, greed for exploitation, and maliciousness?..

"Forte" advises, and Mrs. Skrowonnek is competent. Yes, she has turned the persecution of her husband into a vocation, and the feeling to have been cheated out of her rightful share of his earnings gives her thrust [sic]. Such is the case with a female medical doctor who over the course of years went at her husband with 21 lawyers. He is currently initiating bankruptcy proceedings. "She is not working as a medical doctor anymore, she has a new profession,” he says sarcastically. "She sits in her mansion, writes pleadings and compositions, and confers with her lawyers.”

Naturally, she makes his access to the children as difficult as possible. And the judges? "They say that she is entitled to that.”

She is entitled. No other word in a care-giver - and welfare-state has greater magic. It is a social-democratic totem-word, revered and mesmerizing, and without fail capable to neatly package all of life's exertions.

Entitlement. With Mrs. Skrowonnek, the word has the force of a miracle-weapon. Only, it must be deployed properly, and that's where the children come into play. "A woman must never leave the children behind,” she says, "because then she is left with a very bad hand in the fight over custody.” And only a victorious battle at this front guarantees uninterrupted deliveries.

After a successful separation a-la "Forte” script, men return home after work to find emptied playrooms. The first, daring grab determines [the status quo]. And the fathers, as long as they don't consider retaliatory abduction, have lost their children, because the authorities give custody to those who have had them for the longer period of time.

Mrs. Skrowonnek is no fan of joint custody. Then the woman would always have to "run after the man.” Besides: "if the child is half of the time with the father, the woman loses her claims to support."

Mrs. Skrowonnek speaks of men only as "little twerps,” while in her brochure they are shown in quotation marks as "Lords of Creation.” In the viewpoint of "Forte”, men are either underestimated or overestimated, there are virtually never fellow creatures at the same level.

But Mrs. Skrowonnek falls to a surprisingly subdued level at the end of her tirade. Maybe it is temporary exhaustion, but then perhaps too a revelation that grew silently on her over the years.

She says: "These young things should pull themselves together and not run away at the first frustration-a family provides stability and support.”

That's not a popular revelation these days, as was experienced by author Karin Jaeckel.

Karin Jaeckel is a strong woman, in every respect. She raised three children, authored 60 books and has a husband who after 25 years still inspires her to write love-poems.

She is opulent, a gypsy in the brave province of Oberkirch, a creative powerhouse, with heavy garnet rings and rattling gold wrist-bracelets and a bent to peasant ceramics. At the door to her studio is the sign "No dumping.”

Married for 25 years? What is wrong here? "Marriage is work,” she says dryly, "but work that can have its rewards.” The family is so well adjusted that Karin Jaeckel is able to find several hours each day to devote to her work as an author.

One of her bestsellers illuminated the destinies of the children of priests. She managed to drive the Roman-Catholic Church up the wall with that and above all enthused female critics.

With her newest book she certainly entered the zone of death, the eternal ice of quiet rejection, the complete absence of responses even amongst her acquaintances in the province. She tangled with a mighty enemy: The women's movement.

The book is named: "The used-up Man. Loved no longer and Bled dry-Fathers after Separation” [Liberal translation of the German title "Der gebrauchte Mann. Abgeliebt und abgezockt [4] -Väter nach der Trennung"] Karin Jaeckel describes cases like that of Frank, whom the wife left after eleven years on account of another. She was tired of washing his dirty socks. But even if Frank would have put clean socks only into the dirty laundry, his wife would most likely not have resisted the temptation, to finance her love affair with a Frenchman-with Frank's money. While his wife intends to built a house with his money orders, he lives in a shack with a kitchen-corner and a combination shower/john cabinet, because he can't afford anything else. And when he comes off-work, worn-out, he passes news-stands that display titles on illustrated magazines such as: "Fathers-The lazy Gender.”

But the worst for him: With all possible procedural tricks at her disposal, the ex-wife denies him access to his son. When he once fled to him, she had him returned to her by force.

For weeks he heard his cries in his memory.

In short, Frank is done-in. His girlfriend has to make-do with the leftovers, with a man who doesn't dare anymore to make serious commitments, to father children. Quite possibly she will found what is called in Los Angeles the "Second Wives Club”-a self-help organization of wives in second marriages who want to mobilize against the greed for exploitation and the harassment's of the first.

On the other hand, Frank's divorced wife may count on applause. She did not act irresponsibly and egoistically. To the contrary. According to modern theorists in interpersonal relations, such as Anthony Giddens, she has achieved a distinctive "push toward individualization.” She has experienced an "Increase in Authenticity,” because she managed to crack the "matter-of-course armor" of her marriage.

While the therapeutic new-speak babble anesthetizes the scandal of this sociological brutalization, Karin Jaeckel steers the attention to the victims who are growing up. It is her protocols, which are amongst the most shocking in her book, a concert of voices of sad lack of illusions and unchildlike callousness, but also futile yearning for peace which rises out of the divorce battlefields and familiar landscapes of rubble..

There is the 15-year-old Inge, whose mother got a divorce on the grounds of "emotional neglect. "I find it necessary to have a law which forbids parents to seek divorce. People who have children should stick together at least until their children are grown up.”

Or Rosi, the 10-year-old, who lives together with mother and grandmother. "When I'm grown up, I'll marry a rich man. He must love me very much. He must do all that I want. And he is not allowed to look at another woman. When he does that, I'll get a divorce. Then I get half of everything. And he gets the hassle.”

Karin Jaeckel polemizes with her book not just against a law which belittles women's capacities, by rewarding their escape from marriage and the destruction of the family with boundless omnipotence, but also against the culture which makes these laws and their abuse possible in the first place.

She polemizes against the old cock-off feminism [literal transl.], which saw in man the enemy, exactly like against the new girlie-feminism, which lets the cock stand, so to speak, completely no-ideologically, but considers the rest dumb and non-essential.

The women's movement, which once successfully fought for equal rights in the labor market, is according to Karin Jaeckel today close to intellectual and moral bankruptcy and exhausts itself in malignant, control-addictive absurdities.

For instance there is the private member's bill of an SPD representative to impose household chore duties on men. A beautiful scenario: The shift worker who returns to his home [from work] receives a citation from his wife, on account of having purposely omitted to vacuum the carpet or on account of malicious ignoring of dirty dishes. "By the way, the laundry of the representative gets ironed by the representative's mother,” she says, shaking her head.

"The boundless spreading of contempt for men of the eighties” (Jaeckel) has become in the mean-time an amusing society game in which, ironically, men participate.

They let women speak and write about family problems and concede to them interpretative authority. "And then they stand on the side-lines and nod uncle-like and benevolently to indicate their consent with the stupidest derision.”

Or they deliver tear-laden interviews with well-earning prominent figures like Hillu Schroeder, who managed to market the mud-slinging contest against her husband as self-defense, and herself as victim. Interestingly, she expressed her Kashmir-suffering, the under-providing for her grown-up children, her horses, her dogs, right after that in a publication for homeless people.

It is time for a new jolt, a paradigm-shift, says Karin Jaeckel. And that too would have to come from women. It is about "that we stand up, to protect that what is meant by emancipation, namely practicing partnership and love, opposed to ex-and-run.”

With that she does not exactly flow with the trend. How little, she notices with her new book. It comes with a heretical proposal. How would it be, asks Jaeckel, with a bit more acknowledgment for those women who decide to raise their children within a family, in common with the father?

That book id called "The Wife at my Side” and describes successful biographies of women, who with their husbands marched through a family-life that is not always a bed of roses. While "The used-up Man” at least made it to the preparation for printing, this one encountered already resistance as a manuscript.

"Not suited for publishing,” determined the female reader of the dtv-verlag [the publisher] in Munich, and, like a strict language teacher, "the theme has been missed.” The reader saw in Jaeckel's manuscript a "Lament for the poor, insecure man,” as well as a "General attack on the emancipation.” Especially for "women's periodicals” that would not be very interesting. In closing, the reader ultimately challenged the author "to take back the whole tendency that I mentioned above,” in short: She ordered Karin Jaeckel to write a different book, one that she would like to love to author herself.

Since then, another reader became involved in the project. It is supposed to appear next year. Still, Karin Jaeckel sees in this attempt at censorship the flip-side of the feminist litany of liberation, which by "now” represents a "power.”

We need a new family law, she says, and the prerequisite for that is a new discourse of the genders. "The world,” she writes, "needs not only a new man and father, but also a new woman and mother.”

Most of all it needs mature partners, who understand that frustrations and strife are part of life-and the steadiness to see them through, to love, to marriage-and most of all to the family.

By the way, Guenter Gempp did not protest in vain. The public pressure and the mediation of a mutual woman-friend softened his partner temporarily. He was allowed to spend one week with his children on a vacation trip-to be a father once more, for a week.

DER SPIEGEL 47/1997 - Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung des SPIEGEL-Verlags. Copying allowed only with permission of the SPIEGEL-Verlag.

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re: "The men are the losers” [Verlierer sind die Männer], http://www.pappa.com/vater/vaterlos.htm

Notes:

1) Original title is a word-play "Der entsorgte Vater," meaning literally "The discared Father” a father whose right to care (for his children) has been removed.
2) Xanthippe was the wife of Socrates, of infamous fame as an abusive wife, thanks to whom Socrates often went to find solace with his students and, when he sought respite from her abuse, found the time to become the renowned philosopher. Alas, that "benevolent” influence may also have been at work with Abraham Lincoln who was "blessed” with a Xanthippe of his own.
3) The term "Lebensborn-Principle” refers to the breeding program operated by the Nazis, in which SS men were assigned to breeding camps, where they literally bred women who had been selected on the basis of Aryan attributes (blond hair, blue eyes, stature, etc.). The resulting children became wards of the State and were raised in government-operated camps. There, the children were indoctrinated in Nazi philosophy and concepts.
4) The term "abgezockt” is the past tense of abzocken. It is derived from the English term "to suck-off"