Defender of the Family

Franz-Josef Wurmeling, a booming, bright-eyed Berliner, is one of those well-meaning souls who feel compelled to share their righteousness with less fortunate neighbors. Herr Doktor Wurmeling is West Germany's first Minister for Family Affairs, the official champion of a higher birth rate, a lower divorce rate, more authority for the German husband. A zealous Roman Catholic husband and father (five children), he deplores short skirts, long embraces, plunging necklines. "My ministry," explains Wurmeling, "is the patron saint and guardian of the family."

Franz-Josef Wurmeling's ministry is exceedingly small (only 15 employees), but in the five months since Chancellor Konrad Adenauer created the job for him, the Minister for Family Affairs has made himself the most controversial man in the Cabinet. Since he has little, if any, authority to do things, Dr. Wurmeling has worked simply at saying things. Under fire from several segments of society--Socialists, feminists, moviemakers, Protestant and anticlerical wings of his own party, some of the judiciary--he stood before a crowd of admirers last week and promised: "I shall not close my mouth."

Errant Actors. A bluff six-footer who served in the World War I navy, studied law and economics, Wiirmeling, 53, began a career in the German civil service but was fired by the Nazis (1939) and turned to mining (basalt). After World War II he pitched into Christian Democratic politics, was soon on the party's three-man executive board, the recognized leader of its strong Catholic right wing, and one of Adenauer's busiest campaign speakers. (Wurmeling, his wife recalls, campaigned so hard that "he used to give speeches in his sleep.") After the last election. Adenauer repaid the debt by creating the Ministry for Family Affairs and commissioning Franz-Josef Wurmeling to try to promote for Germany's morals the kind of recovery the economists and politicians have achieved in material affairs.

Wurmeling turned first to divorce. "It just won't do," said he, "to allow someone who feels the urge to change wives one day to be able to do so the next." He cited the facts and figures of German divorce: "Between 1948-52 we had 480,000 divorces"--105 out of every 1,000 marriages.* Then, without any other evidence to back him up, Wurmeling suggested that much of the fault lay with too lenient non-Catholic judges, who "refuse to take a religious oath." That did it. Germans of many denominations joined in denouncing Wurmeling for interfering with civil liberties, attacking the integrity of the courts, and "turning everything upside down." To soothe the ruffled Bundestag, the Minister of the Interior had to take the floor and explain that the Family Minister was "not expressing the policy of the federal government."

From the bench, Wurmeling turned to the movie industry. "The average film." he said, "accents prostitution, eroticism and woman-chasing . . ." He proposed i) a "people's censorship." and 2) a boycott of films made by "errant .[Hollywood] actors . . . who announce they are getting divorces so as to be free to marry each other." The moviemakers screamed ("Terrorism . . . generalized slanting . . ."), but busy Wurmeling was undeterred. For one officially worried about the state of family life in postwar Germany, there were plenty of other problems to tackle: P:With only 23 million men (many of them war-wounded) to balance 26 million women, West Germany's birth rate (15.5 per 1,000) is lower than France's (18.9), far lower than Russia's (26) or that of the U.S. (24.7). "We are a dying nation," Wurmeling insists. As solutions he proposes relief, family allowances, 20-mark pay bonuses for each child after the third, cut-rate train and bus fares for larger families. "Raising the birth rate," he insists, "is not a political plot."

P: Some 500,000 German couples live together out of wedlock. The Germans call these liaisons "uncle marriages" because the older children are usually told that "uncle" has come to stay with mother. Biggest single reason for the uncle marriages: the woman (usually a war widow) can go on collecting her state pension so long as she is legally single; if she remarries, her pension is forfeited. P: West Germany celebrates a high percentage of shotgun weddings. "Above all," said one man in delicately explaining Wiirmeling's job, "he wants to root out conditions that made the seventh month of marriage the most usual one for the birth of the first child."

Small Shop. Under Bonn's postwar constitution, German women, for the first time, were promised "equality"; but so far, the Bundestag (with only 45 women

Deputies) has been unable to agree on implementing legislation. Wurmeling, who is supposed to draw up the new rules, accepts the theory of equal rights for women only grudgingly. In a recent Bundestag debate he stoutly maintained that "the family head must have the final say . . ." A woman Deputy cut in: "Even if the family head is a booby?" Wurmeling smiled coldly and replied: "We should not repeat daily the mistakes of the French Revolution in always thinking only of rights."

For all the storm he has kicked up, Wurmeling still has the all-out backing of Chancellor Adenauer. He is pressing for stiffer divorce laws, better family housing ("Marriage flowers better in one's own home"), church-run marriage classes, "guidance offices" to patch up broken marriages. "They asked me whether I wanted a grown-up ministry," said Wurmeling last week. "I said no ... I like my shop small."

* U.S. rate (1952): 248 per 1,000.

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