When we love, we exceed ourselves. We are prepared
to leave behind the familiar and the well-known. We solve problems
we have never solved before, we jump across the abyss, bear pain
we previously could not bear, and even the fear to love vanishes
when we love.
Love develops with the people, it adapts to them
and takes on the characteristics of the current time. But it’s
nature remains, the nature of love, which can be felt only for
another being.
There are many groups, societies and times in
which love has been forbidden, totally or in part, where power,
ownership, laws and rules have tried to control it. Many poems,
novels and biographies testament to this. Slavery and serfdom,
still a problem not eradicated to this day, pervert the course
of love.
The Renaissance and the thunderous break of the
French Revolution saw the revival of the self. Parallel to this
a second idea began to develop, that of the nation, a common self,
the definition a common profile and differentiation of larger
groups of people from one another. Private property and civil
rights developed, and the church, feudalism and the state had
an ever decreasing influence on the private sphere.
The ideal of personal liberty began to become
generally accepted. Dostoyewsky’s “Devils” provides
a vivid description of the development of freedom from an idea
into practice. If liberty becomes reality then everyone has the
right to decide over life and thus also over death, an idea that
has lost none of its relevance to this day.
Society and politics saw an increasing need and
awareness for more rights for the individual. However, within
the family and economic structures the authoritarian patriarchal
structure remained and was even reinforced through the advancing
industrialisation. This inconsistency was bound to be a cause
of conflict. Within home boudaries it was the women and workers
who increasingly demanded equal rights, outside of the country
in the colonies it was the repressed peoples and races. Seen within
this context the development of the idea of supremacy whether
through gender or race was a necessity in order to legitimise
and maintain existing privileges. If one gender (in this case
male) or a race (in this case white) could be deemed superior,
the idea of a nation being superior was not far off. No longer
bound by rank, clergy or law, middle-class society could remodel
itself in terms of race, politics and/or gender, exploitation
in boundless freedom. Not only the individuum but also the nation
swelled to an all-consuming ego, a situation not self-sustaining
over a length of time.
In Germany, Hitler, amongst other reasons, gained
the majority by assuring a selected group of society, the so-called
Aryans, that they were, by their very being, the natural rulers
of their world. The price of this privilege was subordination
to a rule that would secure their supremacy. The short 15 year
period of democracy of the Weimar Republic were followed by 12
years of domination, in which the rulers systematically became
murderers and in the process of murdering often also the murdered.
This did not fail to leave its mark on the German
woman: On the one hand contempt, mistrust and rejection of the
murderers, of the cannon-fodder, on the other, anxiety, fear of
death and submission. During the six years of war, the women of
Germany became responsible for everyday life and the economy of
the country. After the end of the war, a part of the country’s
women were expected to return to the kitchen stove and to serve
their menfolk as before, even if they could no longer be forced
to. Women who really wanted to could pursue and achieve personal
non-domestic goals. The other half of the country expected them
to do this. A different political concept saw it as central goal,
and it worked, the women continued with that which had become
commonplace in the six years before.
The men had become just as lonely through this
process as the women were. They had to live with their past, inglorious
and so painful that they often preferred to remain silent. They
had to bear the pain of their misuse, they had been seduced and
exploited. And they had to live with women who now instinctively
distrusted them, sometimes even their own sons, who maybe rejected
them and did not confide in them, an incomparable pain for a man.
It is difficult to make such women feel happy and loved, and it
is just as difficult for the women to be happy and to love in
return.
Throughout the history of mankind, women have
always borne children and usually provided for them. Only with
the development of a society based on personal liberty has this
become a systematic disadvantage, barred from equal rights due
to their gender. What a contradiction this is. During this phase
of political development gender became more important than social
position or even achievement. This has affected the pattern of
love and continues to do so today. The process of the development
of personal freedom has not yet reached a satisfactory condition:
that of equal rights and tolerance.
Parallel to the development of individual liberty
through industrialisation and mechanisation, and of late of information
and communication, the converse process of the total subjugation
of nature can be observed. Nature has become raw material whose
internal rules and balance one can ignore, a means to a purpose.
Mankind makes itself and others to objects. Only now, as the last
reservations of nature are under threat, do more and more people
demand their protection and are prepared to take responsibility
for it into their own hands.
