"In one we agree: order and disorder!"
There are two types of people: telephonists and telephone muffels, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim is certainly one of the first. They send her an e-mail to the Sociological Institute in Erlangen, where she teaches and researches women, family, motherhood and partnership. Ask if she and her husband Ulrich Beck would like to have a joint interview, and thinks: This can be difficult - one of them certainly has no time. He heads the Institute of Sociology in Munich, is a professor at the London School of Economics and researches how our society is changing and increasingly focusing on individualisation.
No half day passes, the telephone rings: "Here Beck Gernsheim." They have been asked for a family portrait many times since they published their joint book "The Normal Chaos of Love" in 1990. It is absolutely necessary when a married couple writes a highly progressive, lively classic about the relationships between men and women. Because, as it says in the blurb, "Who does the dishes and when, who wraps Schreihälse, worried the purchase and pushes around the vacuum cleaner, is just as unclear as who earns the rolls, determines the mobility and why actually the beautiful night sides of the bed always with should be enjoyed the qua registry office intended for this purpose, intimated daily life. "
A couple and no appointment
"Of course you want to know now," says Beck-Gernsheim, "how it works in our home." Yes. "With the decades of commuting." Uh-huh. "With our academic careers." Exactly! "Well, it is not that simple ...", she says, and now you would like to start an interview immediately. But the semester breaks start soon, as they make like every summer vacation on Lake Starnberg; then he had to do with his book, she was to a lecture in the Czech Republic, then he in London and: "Now it rings." The 14-year-old niece is at the door. "Maybe we'll see each other," she says then, if at all, in five months at the earliest. "But do not be too happy, my husband has always rejected such stories about our private lives."
Half a year later, he is standing on the upper floor of a two-storey 1970s building in Schwabing, close to the English Garden, a tall man with a stomach, balding coat and formerly reddish-blond curls. I stretch out my hand and say, "Do not come too close!" In the morning he was caught by a flu virus. She wears the dark bobbed headpiece with a clasp, distinctive nose, silk scarf in twin set, and moves a little stiff. "I have migraines, but come in!"
In the living room he sits down on the chaise longue, feet up, with a view of the white bookcase and the balcony. An autumn storm lashes the spruce trees in front of the window. A television does not have the Beck. She hands tea and dominoes on a black Ikea service. Everything seems factual and ordered, flourishes or jewelry are apparently not really important to them.
Work and partnership are one of the Becks - and that's how it began, back then in the sociology seminar in Munich. "We both had presentations, but the tasks were strangely worded, and I could not handle it and Ulrich did not - and then you just wanted to talk to the other speaker," she says soberly. - "That's how it came about," he says even more soberly. She laughs. "And so we speak today." A concise but significant anecdote.
Because how couples tell their myth of origin says a lot about their relationship. The Becks comes along objectively - without much pathos, without great emotional changes, more like a long discourse between two strong minds, the desire to think. She laughs often and briskly. He has a calm way of speaking, almost gently.
So he also tells how he came to this subject, his vocation: Sociology - as a student, he did not even know what that is. In Hannover, he grew up with his four siblings, his father was a naval officer, Ulrich Beck wanted to study as far away from home. He went to Freiburg to study law, but quickly switched to philosophy, because he needed "a great brainstorming". But because in Munich, too, where he had soon gone, only the history of philosophy was taught and less the great thought, "I slipped into sociology, there then took place the great life and the great discussions." It was the year 68.
It was similar with Elisabeth Gernsheim when she graduated from high school in Stuttgart in 1966."I've looked in the dictionary once, and there was something completely abstract about the structure of the company ... Encyclopedia closed, end." So she went well into a career counseling. And because she liked languages, she enrolled at a language school in Lausanne. In the Abiferien she visited her uncle in Florenz, which said: "So you become a better Fremdsprachensekretärin? You can never think for yourself! I could imagine psychology and sociology for you." He has hit the bullseye, say the Becks in unison.
However, Ulrich Beck almost did not become a professor, because an expert in his habilitation told him that he was a Marxist. "That would have been the end of the career," says Beck, "but my director has rescued me and advised me: You go now to the professors and tell them what is in your habilitation and how understandable that is." - " and what a dear boy you are, "she says, patting his knee. He nods, and you immediately take the harmless boy from him.
Only that she sometimes struggles in the following years to give the good wife. He taught as a professor in Munich, Münster and Bamberg. She did her doctorate and research in Münster, Gießen, Hamburg, Munich. He was already established, she was not always taken seriously. "If my professor found something good about my work, he talked about it with my husband," she says. "If he found something bad, he spoke to me." The time in Bamberg was the hardest, "that almost cost us the marriage". Because she felt there only as a wife. Once a foreign colleague came to visit, with whom she would like to talk. But on one side of the room, the wives sat and talked about their children's school problems, on the other, the men discussed sociology. And? What did she do? "Probably got a migraine," she says laughing and sums up: "A double career as a professor is terrible, you are forced to geographic mobility, you have to publish constantly, there is hardly room for privacy." For 25 years, the two commute between different cities. She is in Erlangen from Monday to Wednesday and he in Munich. She used to like to travel, but now she only longs for home. And that's why the big wooden animals that she has set up in the living room do not come directly from India, but from a shop in the city. She used to travel to India as a student. "Today I feel quite different when I only think of airports."
And so it came that Ulrich Beck, after he had taught in Cardiff and London, in 1997 rejected a call to the legendary British University Cambridge. His eyes are still shining when he talks about this opportunity. Everything was offered to him there - only the most important thing not: "That my wife can come along as a lecturer," he says. They just did not understand what a catch they had made with them both.
The professor had long ago written her pertinent article on the role of women in an individualized society, which was programmatically called "From being for others to the right to a life of their own". They had described together in the "quite normal chaos of love" how the relationships between the sexes changed. They agreed that society had changed so radically in recent decades that it needed new concepts.
How do such theses arise? Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim says: "We come from very different directions: Ulrich comes from above, from abstraction, I come from below, from the very concrete example." Ulrich Beck says: "We also have a very different style, we can really get their hands on it, so we wrote the individual chapters for each one of them, they read very carefully and critically, I'm a bit faster and not so exactly."
So far the theory, and how does it look in practice? More precisely, he takes it in the common everyday life. He does not mind if disorder prevails, he says. And she says: "Yes, but in one we agree: I have a regulatory delusion, and you have a disorderly delusion." He just can not stand it, he says and plucks at his sweater, if you "always zippelt me so". "So we decided - but it does not always work - to write on a bulletin board what needs to be done instead of zipping it all the way, but," she laughs, "of course he has to look." He has to work the neighboring apartment as an office. When he sits at a book, the piles of paper pile up. "The first time he came to my living room," she says, "I thought: Oh, he wants to be close to me, how nice! He did not get over there and then started to open his office in the living room . " One day she set up a pin board for him, because: "If my husband really wanted to find something, he hung it on my pin board."
Children do not have the Beck's.It is astonishing when you hear Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim talking about motherhood and work, lack of nursery school and unfair education, and how blue-eyed her students see her future as a working parent. Her childlessness was at least not accused of being a colleague. "Only a male colleague with five children once denied me the legitimacy of judging motherhood and women's life," she says.
Short break. The photographer comes, he asks both portrait. "Definitely in front of the wall of books," she says with amusement, and that this - he is sitting, she standing - is the classic patriarchal pose.
Ulrich Beck is visibly relieved when, after posing, he is able to recount, most of all his work and the question that concerns him at the moment: why the churches as institutions are out, but that the religiousness of each individual is booming. Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim listens to him and asks. Interested, but also critical. And in those moments, everything else seems to be secondary to both. They talk about God and the world today for more than an hour, and when you look at them, it quickly becomes clear that this discourse is what makes this relationship. Eight minutes of conversation daily as with other average couples would never be enough at the Becks, right? She laughs. "We talk to each other for hours." - "Preferably while running," he says. And then she again: "If we go our three hours around the Staffelsee, we get really in motion."
A few days after the meeting, the phone rings. She just wanted to say again: you are a "terrible, completely failing couple". She realized this when she read what Uschi Glas said about her relationship: that they never quarrel and always hold hands. "I confess it quite openly," says Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, "we have argued before." She says it three times, so that the last doubter still understands the irony, and then it roars in the receiver, and one senses: This woman is routinely on the phone, and she uses his distance to reveal the whole cruel truth.
Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim
Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, 61, deals with the transformation of society and how the role of women in it changes. The sociologist has written several books about motherhood, employment and the desire to have children, most recently: "The Children's Question Today - On Women's Life, Desire to Have Children and Decreased Birth" (175 pages, 10.90 euros, C. H. Beck). Together with her husband she wrote the 1990 classic about the relationship between man and woman: "The normal chaos of love" (304 p., 9 euros, Suhrkamp). She is currently researching transnational marriages, partners who live in different countries.
Ulrich Beck
Ulrich Beck, 64, became internationally famous in the mid-eighties for his first book, "Risk Society: On the Way to a Different Modernity" (396 pp., 12,50 Euro, Suhrkamp). Many societal, environmental and economic risks began to become excessive and global. At the same time, a process had begun in which the freedom of decision of the individual grew larger and larger. Everyone was increasingly able to determine their own lives. How the society changes in this "Second Modernity", describes the sociologist again and again in his newspaper articles on current political debates.
