Relationship stories: Between love, care and conflict. Marriages and Couple Relations in Germany (1945–1990)

• Applicant: Dr. Lisa Dittrich (†)
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 440791863

Marriages and couple relationships are a place where central fields of society, employment and family work, leisure and gender relations meet, so that cultural and social transformations in everyday life can be observed with their investigation. In the course of the changes in modernity, its character as an emotional couple relationship increasingly suppressed marriage as a sacrament and a contract, in short as a socially legitimized and standardized as well as institutionalized form of living together. Especially in the 20th century, couple relationships underwent a fundamental change. Family and children became an option in the industrialized world. Gender relations equalized. The bourgeois ideal of love marriage became the norm across all classes.In historical research, however, relationships between couples are mostly viewed from the outside, regardless of whether it is a matter of social statistical developments, marriage as an institution, the discourse of love, family policy or the views of experts. Marriage as a couple's relationship remains underexposed and thus the emergence of the modern understanding of marriage cannot be adequately grasped. This is where the project comes in: it will consistently pursue an internal perspective and examine it against the background of the already known demographic, institutional, political and normative changes in marriages. The focus is on the radical changes in marriage in the second half of the 20th century. By investigating marriages and couple relationships in the FRG and GDR, the project examines whether a common German marriage culture existed and pursues the hitherto neglected question of the social transformation beyond the political systems. In this way, the contemporary historical debates on the periodization of social change focused on the FRG are expanded and the increasing interest in perspectives on post-war history across the blocs is taken up. In a long-term perspective, the project will clarify the dynamics and developments at the couple’s level and examine the interplay between the micro, meso and macro levels in order to identify causalities of change and the room of manoeuvre of couples which do not come into the focus in political, legal or discourse-historical as well as social statistical approaches.Based on crisis situations as reflected in ego documents and retrospectively in interviews as well as in the consolidating field of counselling (counselling columns, guidebook literature and counselling institutions), concepts of marriage and couple relationships, everyday life organisation, leisure activities, concrete conflict resolution as well as gender relations in the context of the change of politics and society are examined. On the basis of the concept of lifestyle, in a mixture of everyday life history and discourse analysis, marriages are to be analysed as a place of negotiation and cultures of couple relationships are to be worked out.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Maren Röger