Women have long been held back in Germany, but that is now changing
DON’T be fooled by the familiar presence of a guinea-pig in a cage, or the primary colours. Something radical is afoot at the Wolkenzwerge crèche, on the sixth floor of a Berlin office block. Parents drop their children before going to work at Axel Springer, publisher of the tabloid Bild, and pick them up at 7.30pm or later. Springer, no friend of liberation movements in the 1960s, helps pay for places at Wolkenzwerge to tempt mothers back to work.
That would seem less daring if it were not so rare. Germany has day-care places for only a sixth of children of under three (and that includes traditionally higher provision in the ex-communist east). This is one reason why German women lag their sisters in other rich countries in combining motherhood and work. Female employment is above average. But when (and if) they become mothers, women tend to drop out or go part-time. “So far in Germany, women had to make a choice [between children and career],” says Jeanne Fagnani of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. French and Scandinavian women feel much less pressure.
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