Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age: Theorising the Family in 1950s West Germany

dc.contributor.author

CHAPPEL, JAMES

dc.date.accessioned

2021-05-19T15:29:30Z

dc.date.available

2021-05-19T15:29:30Z

dc.date.issued

2017-02

dc.date.updated

2021-05-19T15:29:29Z

dc.description.abstract

<jats:p>This essay explores the imagination of the family in 1950s West Germany, where the family emerged at the heart of political, economic and moral reconstruction. To uncover the intellectual origins of familialism, the essay presents trans-war intellectual biographies of Franz-Josef Würmeling, Germany's first family minister, and Helmut Schelsky, the most prominent family sociologist of the period. Their stories demonstrate that the new centrality of the family was not a retreat from ideology, as is often argued, but was in fact a reinstatement of interwar ideologies in a new key: social Catholicism in the former case, National Socialism in the latter. These divergent trajectories explain why Würmeling and Schelsky, despite being two central defenders of the family in the 1950s, could not work together. The essay follows their careers into the 1960s, suggesting that the fractious state of familialism in the 1950s helps us to understand its collapse in the face of the sexual revolution.</jats:p>

dc.identifier.issn

0960-7773

dc.identifier.issn

1469-2171

dc.identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22936

dc.language

en

dc.publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

dc.relation.ispartof

Contemporary European History

dc.relation.isversionof

10.1017/s0960777316000539

dc.title

Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age: Theorising the Family in 1950s West Germany

dc.type

Journal article

pubs.begin-page

85

pubs.end-page

109

pubs.issue

1

pubs.organisational-group

Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

pubs.organisational-group

History

pubs.organisational-group

Duke

pubs.publication-status

Published

pubs.volume

26

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