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diggThe Eva phenomenon
A German motherhood campaigner's Nazi moment dissolves in a mass email blitz on political correctness in the media ruling class.
I couldn´t believe it. Last week I stepped out of the intercity train at Berlin and, once again, Eva Herman was looking at me -- from page one of Bild, the German market leader tabloid with 10 million readers.
Eva Herman (48) has achieved something few television anchormen have achieved before: four times in two weeks she dominated the front page of Bild. What is more, a week ago she was thrown out of one of Germany´s most popular talk shows, Kerner. But most important, this dismissal on camera sparked a rare debate in newspapers, e-papers and blogs which reveals a new dimension of protest against the TV ruling class. Ironically enough, Eva Herman herself was until recently part of that elite. In 2003 the ever-stylish former presenter of the Tagesschau news was elected anchorwoman of the year.
What is going on?
Basically there are three issues. First, Herman´s new-found faith in the family.
Second, her alleged comparison of the family values which still existed under the Nazis with the abolition of those values by the "class of 1968".
And third, e-mail mass protests in Germany against the television supremos have produced a new concept of public opinion.
What was a typical blonde-TV-star-puts-her-foot-in-it incident developed a completely new e-dynamic in the internet community. The day after the Kerner show Herman received on her homepage 5000 supportive emails; after five days the number had grown to more than 20,000. Blogs of the leading German papers got several thousand messages mostly critical of the television establishment and pro-Herman.
It all began in 2006 with her best-selling book, Das Eva Prinzip (The Eva Principle). In the simplest terms, the book says that modern dogma wants women to find fulfilment first and foremost in a career, but this leaves them bitter and burned out, with too little time for husband, motherhood and family.
In a key sequence Herman remembers a call she got during a holiday abroad from a best friend, a good-looking 41-year-old successful businesswoman and single mother from Hamburg. She had suffered a serious heart attack and wept on the phone saying: "Everyone thinks I am so tough. Yes, but I would have much preferred a normal family life to the life I lead. I often thought about committing suicide. I feel so overstretched and empty. Only the responsibility for my 10-year-old daughter prevented me from doing it." Herman hung up, went to her three women friends in the holiday resort, told the story, and one by one the three of them, all around forty -- a businesswoman, an artist and another anchorwoman -- started to cry. "This is our life," they agreed. "We all feel like this."
Don´t make my mistake
That was a starting point for the thrice-divorced Herman to give a voice to many disillusioned women who felt betrayed by the new dogma of self-realisation. She says: Don´t make the mistake I made.
All right, you say, she is one of the many who notice late what matters in life. Better late than never. But why all the fuss about her?
It comes down to this: during a press conference to present her second book on this topic, The Noah's Ark Principle: Why We Must Save the Family, she said the following:
"We have to make the burden for families lighter and not heavier. And we also have to create more justice between families with and those without children. And we have to give a more positive connotation to the role of the mother in Germany, which unfortunately had been abolished by the Nazis and the subsequent movement of 1968. We all know that there was a highly dangerous politician who led the German people into its ruin, but what was good -- and that is values, that is children, that is mothers, that is families, keeping together -- all this was abolished by the 68-ers. Nothing should stay as it was."
There were 30 journalists at the press conference. None took offence. The questions were the normal ones on the subject of the family. But next morning a report by one female journalist in a Hamburg daily alleged that Herman had applauded the family values of the Nazis.
Then all the agencies and TV stations jumped on the bandwagon and a typical German debate began: Is it possible to compare anything with what happened under the Nazis? Political correctness states, No! The slaughter of millions of Jews was unique in history. Or, as Jewish journalist Henryk M. Broder says: "There is a rule in current affairs discussions that every participant should heed. The first one to say 'Hitler', 'Nazis' or 'Third Reich' has played the bad card (actually, Broder's expression was a lot stronger). He either sympathises with the Nazis or, worse still, he violates the 11th commandment: 'You shall not compare!'"
There was, in fact, a simple way to check Herman's intentions. In The Eva Principle she dedicated a whole chapter to the negative effects of a book by a Nazi woman on motherhood, indignant that this book was still in print at the end of the 1970s. And she took part in a public campaign against neo-nazi hooligans in the 1990s. So everyone could have known where she stands.
The real media frenzy
Herman denied what was reported about her now but could not prove it. She had not recorded her press conference. Strangely enough, the biggest private TV company in Germany, RTL, had filmed the whole thing but did not want to give her the tapes. Happily for Herman one of the other journalists had taped the conference. When the media fuss broke out, he sent her his MP3.
Then came the invitation to appear on the Kerner show. "It was a tribunal with Eva Herman in the role of the accused, Johannes B. Kerner as prosecutor, and three lay judges who had agreed on the judgement before the beginning of the process," writes Broder. After 55 minutes she was dismissed by Kerner in front of the cameras. For what? Kerner had solemnly pronounced the words "unrestrained individualism". This term, he noted, was used by chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. Herman had also used these words. When Kerner asked her why she used the same words as Rosenberg she lost countenance and quipped, "I don't want to comment on that. Motorways were built [in that era] too and we drive on them." Kerner said immediately, "Motorways is too much," and asked her to leave.
Now comes the real media frenzy. What was until then a typical blonde-TV-star-puts-her-foot-in-it incident developed a completely new e-dynamic in the internet community. The day after the Kerner show Herman received on her homepage 5000 supportive emails; after five days the number had grown to more than 20,000. Blogs of the leading German papers got several thousand messages mostly critical of the television establishment and pro-Herman.
As one blogger wrote: "I have the same feeling as in September 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, a certain 'something is happening here'. The people are very patient but not so stupid as the PC media men would like. 'We are the people', the slogan of the peaceful revolution in the GDR against the ruling communist class, has already worked once ..."
That might be one of the reasons why not only the quality papers, but also last Tuesday's Bild once again opened its pages to Eva Herman and interviewed her in a full-page article, which is unusual for a tabloid. In the interview Herman drew the conclusion that "there is a difference between public opinion and published opinion".
Sorry, Eva, this is not true any more. Thanks to the internet.
Hartwig Bouillon is MercatorNet's contributing editor for Germany. He writes from Muenster/Westfalia.
Andrew Byrne is correct. There has been an unrelenting slaughter of the innocents in the womb for decades. This has been a social and political agenda since Margaret Sanger began her attack on the truth and meaning of human sexuality. Lust is so different than love. The social engineers and atheists are having a field day pushing their ideas on the unsuspecting.
The Muslim world sees and feels the pollution of the Western world invading their country and they are fighting back. Their terrorism is horribly wrong and decadent itself. Completing covering the face of a woman so only the eyes can see out of slits is extreme to say the least. However, the vulgar and immodest dress of the Western world is equally extreme in its cleavage and tastelessness. Men, women and children are all effected by extremes.
If people google to view pictures of aborted babies the carnage would stop. Be careful. Your life will change forever.
The Creator, Supreme Being, Prime Causation, “ I Am Who Am”, Unmoved Mover, I like to call this Being God, has a beautiful design for the man, woman and child. First, that they love one another together. Second, that no one has the right to take the life of another person. If we start with the premise that no one has any right to take the life of another human being we might stop the abbatoir of the abortion clinics that are the scourge of the world. The spiritual devastation that occurs when a child is decapitated and dismembered in the womb of its protector is mentally, emotionally and spiritually horrific for the man, woman and, needless to say, the beautiful being in the womb.
Let us all pray together to Our Unfathomable Supreme Being and Creator that the world will stop the slaughter of His creatures.
There is no creature more beautiful than a child.
Good to read about the influence on public opinion that the sincerely expressed view of one woman can have. In Ireland too there is usually a great divergence between what the ‘ordinary people’ think about the things that matter and what is published in the media read by the ‘intelligentsia’. In Ireland it takes a small privately published newspaper distributed free to give the truth of the news about the pressures being put by the EU on its member states, e.g the manipulation of so called ‘children’s rights’ to take away or reduce the natural responsibility of parents for their own children. The people elect representatives to government and then it looks as if the representatives simply rubber stamp endless directives from the EU that have already been in the pipeline for a long time. It would be important for people to realise this is happening all the time.
Good job mercatornet!
It seems clear that mass media does not know, and does not care to try to understand female anthropology. Success in work is not all for a woman. She has a natural need to form (give form)a family of her own. It seems to me that women themselves have been convinced of that by media… for a while.
Hi TLDS! Motherhood is more than a ‘role’. Some would argue that it is intrinsic to being a woman - whether you physically give birth or not. Please don’t tell me I am ‘gender-stereo-typing’ (!) when I say that women are called to nurturing, caring, protecting etc in a way that men are not. Women who choose not to have children, such as nuns, will exercise their maternal instincts in other ways.
Few women would choose a career instead of children; those who do usually regret it - because they realise that they have ignored or neglected a fundamental aspect of being a woman. It is not so much a question of choosing between 2 lifestyles, in this case, to have children or not to have them (as you might choose to live in the country or in the city); it is more a question of choosing to recognise that certain things flow from being a woman which, if suppressed, will cause suffering sooner or later.
I wouldn’t be surprised that underneath a lot of women feel like Eva. Most of the women who had children at the same time as me went back to work, and ALL of them said they felt guilty at leaving their children with the child carer/partner/grandparents.
I agree about the media too. They unfortunately are driven by sensationalism and normal family life doesn’t fit the criteria. Anything that is “out there” is newsworthy, but anything that supports normality is not worth reporting.
To “the lesbian down the street”: yes the article was talking about four females, but what about the 20,000 emails????? Surely that is some indication of the feelings of European women (and men) on this subject?
Let the people speak and let the PC elites howl. It is time that the liberal/socialist stranglehold on Europe ended and people start being able to live more human and more free lives.
That kind of stuff could only happen in Germany ... there is no media censoring hear in the states ... can’t talk anymore, have to go, some guy has offered me a good deal on some land in Louisiana…
The ways of providence amaze me for God knows the way, the how, the time and all the things necessary to correct the direction of human history away from the self serving purposes of all those manipulators who think they’re in charge and parade themselves as saviours of the world clamoring for exclusive attention. A heart and mind has been gently touched and I’m sure there were many who were praying for it, there is more to be done, therefore let us increase our prayers and our trust in God and also work to change ourselves relying always on His Grace without which we cannot do nothing that is good.
Wow^^ The evidence for a “normal” family life -seems- convincing… to the untrained ear^^;;
This nice passage^^
“Everyone thinks I am so tough. Yes, but I would have much preferred a normal family life to the life I lead. I often thought about committing suicide. I feel so overstretched and empty. Only the responsibility for my 10-year-old daughter prevented me from doing it.”
And then:
“This is our life,” they agreed. “We all feel like this.”
Right^^ Except that those aren’t the opinions of career females.
They’re the opinions of four German career females the author happens to know; which, as anyone of moderate intelligence will agree, is a dangerously small sample size.
And this quote intrigues me^^
“In the simplest terms, the book says that modern dogma wants women to find fulfillment [-[spelling corrected]-] first and foremost in a career, but this leaves them bitter and burned out, with too little time for husband, motherhood and family.”
I wish to advocate something a bit simpler: Women should find fulfillment in -what fulfills them-! And the rest of society should just let them do so.
If a woman finds fulfillment in raising a kid, she should go for it.
If a woman finds fulfillment in working for a corporation all her life, she should go for it.
If a woman wants a mix of both, go. for. it.
Because nobody ever ends up happy pressured into a role they don’t like. And when you involve kids… well, social development becomes an issue.
Kids do best with happy parents; I’m sure we can all agree on -that-.
Anyways, that’s my two cents. I got a bit worked up.
Have a nice day, all^^
I feel that there are many women like Eva Herman in this galaxy! In Europe specially, with so anti-Christian demagogues, we must remember that this continent is naturally Christian!
Congratulations!
I love the smell of burning “PC media men” in the morning, it smells like...victory!
Enjoyed your piece. It’s good to see defence of the family. Thanks also for drawing attention to censorship by the media. How I would like to read some articles comparing the millions of deaths of aborted children (and the virtually total silence by the Western media on these murders) with the scandal attached to the fact that people in Europe were slow to react and condemn the Holocaust. How long did that silence last? Abortion has lasted 40 years in Britain, and we still can’t publish pictures…
Well, maybe common people still can take the public opinion back from the manipulating hands of the media spin doctors… I certainly hope so.
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