Divorce, in All Its Angst
You’re a divorced, middle-aged German guy thumbing through the new War of the Roses magazine when you discover on page 8 how much the dating scene has changed since you and your disco threads were last on the prowl: The Billy Boy condom company wants to rent you a “flirt dog.”
It’s not a designer prophylactic. It’s a real dog. German women love dogs, which, by extension, means they might consider going out with the guy on the other end of the leash. The dog is the “ultimate secret recipe for the successful flirt,” states the magazine, which also has advice on how to cook salmon in the dishwasher.
War of the Roses, the only magazine of its kind in Germany, and possibly Europe, is written for the lost, hurt, mending, defiant, neurotic souls of the divorced. It is a mix of intriguing snippets and longer, probing stories on custody battles, psychological syndromes, divorce law, investment tips and the perils of online dating.
“People are telling us, ‘Why didn’t this magazine exist when my divorce was going on?’ ” said Mike H. Neumann, who edits the magazine with colleague Marion von Gratkowski. War of the Roses debuted in October and was named after the 1989 Hollywood black comedy in which Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas played a couple in the midst of a brawling divorce.
RosenKrieg, as it is known in German, prints 35,000 copies of each bimonthly edition, with a core readership of men and women between 25 and 50. Its design is a mix of muted glitz and matter-of-factness, like pasting a provocative cover on a mathematics quarterly. A muscular naked man enfolded in thought fronts the December issue.
The headlines and profiles elucidate the whimsical vagaries of love and the sting of solitary reality:
“No one and nothing will ever take my freedom again,” states a dour-looking guy named Georg, pictured on page 36 wearing a leather jacket and leaning against a silver-studded Harley. Georg’s “nightmare” marriage cost him 250,000 euros, or about $300,000, and three stays in a psychiatric hospital. He was saved, he explains, by a vision of himself riding through a summer field, smelling flowers and his own sweat and throttling toward the sunset.
“There are about 220,000 divorces in Germany a year, and that’s up from about 150,000 from a decade ago,” Neumann said. “It’s a problem. Everything is more separated. People are more egoistic. They don’t know what to do with their partners and their kids. And if you’re the child of a divorce, you carry the ‘divorce disease’ with you.”
The magazine mirrors a divorce rate that is among the highest in Europe. Like much of the continent, this nation of 82 million is increasingly secular and economically uncertain. The religious and social precepts that once held marriages together are loosening.
The continent is also facing a dramatic demographic shift: the lowest fertility rates in the world and a rapidly aging population. These factors are compounded by the prevalence of divorce, which psychologists and social workers say is another burden on Germany’s welfare system.
War of the Roses would fit nicely on the coffee tables of the country’s top politicians. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has had four wives. Joschka Fischer, who was his foreign minister, is on spouse No. 5. There’s a joke in Germany that Schroeder and Fischer never traveled together on state trips because if they both died, the government would have been hit with exorbitant widow pension payments.
The magazine investigated why 56% of German marriages fail. That compares with 43.7% in the European Union overall and nearly 50% in the U.S. The answers were hardly surprising: affairs, unemployment, financial problems, higher numbers of working women. And in Germany, Neumann said, “no-fault divorces became legal in 1977, so it’s become much easier. Before, somebody had to lie. Someone had to be guilty whether they were actually guilty or not.”
These days, single mothers, depressed fathers, disillusioned children and others battered by divorce are “on TV every day,” said Neumann, a divorced father of three who believes that most couples don’t thoroughly contemplate the sanctity and weight of a lifelong commitment.
Such sentiment echoes those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German poet who wrote “Faust,” the tale of a man’s deal with the devil. He also penned a lesser-known bit of wisdom about marriage: “Love is an idealistic thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the idealistic never goes unpunished.”
A fast-moving man with a black ponytail, Joerg Schulz has not been profiled in War of the Roses, but his story has a familiar resonance. A philosopher, biologist, teacher and music writer (“My wife and I moved into our house on Ringo Starr’s birthday”), Schulz walked into an office at Berlin’s Humboldt University carrying a satchel of books, including one he’d written on heavy metal musician Ozzy Osbourne. He sat by a tin of Christmas cookies and told his story.
“My wife was a typical bourgeois lady who had in mind only one kind of work and family and of having a certain state or place in society,” said Schulz, 45, who met her when they were 16-year-olds growing up in communist East Berlin. “But I had to be around the world, in my work and with my writing.”
The marriage lasted eight years and produced two children. The divorce was contentious, and the reintroduction to dating was more precarious than expected, especially, Schulz said, after he “met a new woman who happened to be addicted to marijuana.” He’s single these days. It took a while to adjust, and the divorce, mainly over his need to lead a more bohemian and unstructured life, he said, has brought him peace.
“Thirty years ago, there was a certain value attached to family,” he said. “But today marriage is very often viewed as an event. ‘Let’s get married and have an event, and let’s have another event next year and go to Japan.’
“Globalization is part of the problem. The rich became richer and people have become more flexible, moving from job to job. We’re mobile. And people think there’s no need to fight for a marriage staying together. They say, ‘Ah, there will be another chance.’ ”
Asked if he and his ex-wife would ever reconcile, Schulz looked down and his face hardened. Then he broke into the kind of grin a man has after surviving a bar fight.
“She’s remarried and belongs to a yacht club,” he said. “If she were brave enough, she’d kill me. For example, she put my beetle collection -- not the band, the bugs -- in a damp room and ruined it.”
Still, Schulz says he’s doing fine. He’s got projects going (“Deep Purple’s coming to town in February”) and at least the appearance of optimism. But what about the guys who aren’t so emotionally flush, those in the divorced’s lonely hearts club, apprehensively trying to eke their way back into dating while trying to figure out how to empty the dust bag in the vacuum cleaner?
“Older people, guys in their 40s and 50s, can fall into a hole,” Neumann said. “At that age, you’re not used to flirting and dating. Older men might suffer more in divorces than women. They’re not used to keeping a house running. They know this is a washing machine, but they don’t know how it works.”
But if that guy turns to page 47 he can learn, compliments of the Frag Mutti (Ask Mom) column, that cola (“a cheap kind will do”) and vinegar are ideal for cleaning toilets. “Let stand overnight,” Mutti says. Turn a few more pages to How to Flirt the Right Way, where item 2 suggests: “Switch off your hunting instinct. You don’t want to hunt and kill, you want to discover.”
Doris Schwedler felt she had been her family’s version of Frag Mutti for too long. Married for 18 years and the mother of three grown children, Schwedler is in the midst of a divorce. She has a new job and a new alias for computer dating. Her bio floats in cyberspace; the details of her marriage are sketched in court papers. Her husband is getting the house and the money, she her freedom, a Berlin flat and a new dating scene that reflects the country’s economic hardships and bereft men.
“I found another way for me,” said Schwedler, a 46-year-old student counselor with a quick smile, a winter tan and dyed magenta hair. “My husband wanted me home washing and cleaning. He didn’t want to share the work. I wanted more. I moved out. I think marriage is good for 10, maybe 15 years. After this time you should start thinking about moving on or renegotiating the contract because people change, they go different ways.”
She was married in 1987, not far from the Berlin Wall, where the politics of the world would change two years later. German reunification brought paeans and promises, but few jobs. The country’s unemployment rate -- now 11% -- has been persistent, and even men like Schwedler’s soon-to-be ex, who works for a boiler manufacturer, are facing downsizings and relocations. Her husband has accepted a company job in Thailand to avoid being fired.
There are many such tales out there, flitting across computer screens, sent and received by those looking for love and other things in chat rooms and wireless mailboxes.
“People out there dating are old -- they’ve had other lives,” she said. “Ninety percent of the men dating online don’t want a relationship. They want sex.
“Only 5% want something lasting. Twenty percent of the men you meet in computer dating are unemployed and looking for a working woman. Many of the people in this country are jobless, and it’s creating a lot of problems.”
War of the Roses tells stories like Schwedler’s. But it also offers tips on glamour and painful life lessons wrapped in humor. A man shops for a Barbie doll for his daughter’s birthday. There’s Barbie goes to the beach, Barbie goes to the opera, Barbie goes on vacation, each for 19.95 euros. On the shelf next to them is Divorced Barbie, selling for 395 euros.
“Why is the price so high?” the man asks.
The salesperson responds: “Divorced Barbie comes with Ken’s house, Ken’s boat, Ken’s car and Ken’s motorcycle.”
