The Farmer’s Wife: In West Germany, Finding One Is Getting Tougher All the Time

For many West German farmers, bad weather and complex price policies aren’t the only problems: finding a wife is another.

“Part of the problem with German women is the liberation movement,” said Helmut Motschmann, a 53-year-old farmer. “They all want to have their own jobs--they get divorced--they don’t want to live on a farm. The world has changed.”

Motschmann, whose first wife died 10 years ago, is now married to a 35-year-old woman from the Philippines.

“I couldn’t find a German woman who was interested in farm life,” he said in an interview at his home in the Upper Franconia region of Bavaria, the country’s southernmost state.

Shortage of Women

The former Mercedida Santos smiled as her husband told of their meeting and marriage seven years ago. Asked how she felt about farm life in West Germany, Mercidida Motschmann replied in English: “It’s OK.” The couple has a 5-year-old son, Christopher.

The Bavarian state Farmers Women’s Assn. in Munich says a survey it conducted shows a shortage of women in the rural areas, partly attributed to economic problems in the farming sector.

“We found that for each 100 men there are only between 76 and 80 women,” said association director Heide-Marie Seltner. “We also found that while the young farmers are learning their trade, their mothers are at home to take care of them, so they don’t look for a wife. Then suddenly the mother is old, the son is 30, and the young women are already married or have a job in the city.”

The Search Goes On

Erich Thiesen, spokesman for the Schleswig-Holstein Farmers’ Assn. says problems finding a farm wife in that northern state are the same.

“We have no accurate statistics on it, but there are more than a dozen advertisements carried in our weekly newspaper from farmers looking for a wife,” Thiesen said.

Martin Gripp, single and 31, runs a dairy farm in the Westerhorn district of Schleswig-Holstein, about 25 miles north of Hamburg. He agrees that finding a bride is not easy for a farmer.

“It’s because we have so little time, the long hours,” he said. “Most women today don’t want to put up with that.”

No Chance to Meet Women

Manfred Petersen, 34, finally got married in July, but only after a story about his trouble finding a wife appeared in a newspaper nearly two years ago.

“After Bild am Sonntag (West Germany’s Sunday tabloid) printed the story in February, 1986, Cornelia and I met when she came here on vacation,” Petersen said of his 27-year-old wife. Many West Germans take vacations on farms.

Petersen, who runs a dairy farm near the remote village of Brande Hoernerkirchen, about 20 miles north of Hamburg and not far from Gripp, said that most of the 30,000 single men among the 300,000 full-time farmers in West Germany don’t get a chance to meet women because farms are in remote areas.

Bernd van Deenen, a professor of sociology in Bonn, completed a recent study of 420 single farmers between the ages of 18 and 27, and 500 single women between the ages of 17 and 25 on their attitudes on farm marriages.

Complicated Problems

“There are a number of reasons farmers have problems finding wives,” Deenen said. “One of them is that people don’t see farming as a career with a future because more and more farmers are going broke or have to take on another job to survive.”

He said the problems faced by farmers who wait until they are 30 years old to look for a wife are even more complicated. “For young girls 18 to 21, a man of 28 is already hopelessly old, and the available women his own age have careers.”