Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

Discontent in the Bürgerliche Society 1900–1933 • 235demanded equal rights for women, specifically the right to manage their property,equal guardianship over their children and independent testamentary rights over theirestates: ‘I believe it is false, as many have said, that a nation’s civilization is measuredbest by the position of women.’ 125 ‘If the German nation is to march forwardtowards a higher civilization’, he suggested that ‘German women must have a betterposition in society like women in other nations.’ 126 Hostility toward the family lawwas echoed in the complaints of left-wing liberals like Albert Träger and EugenRichter of the Liberal People’s Party. Träger satirically commented:Let us admit that women have shown themselves everywhere to be of equal ambitionand equal worth to men. And how many marriages have we seen in all classes of societyin which, gentlemen, it is the wife who bears the real burden of the marriage, not justwith her property, but also, gentlemen, with her earnings, with her work! And how is it,gentlemen that you then want to place such a wife under the unconditional control of herhusband? 127In the meantime, couples in the west of the Reich resorted to the same prenuptialmeasures they had relied on to escape the ill effects of the earlier Code civil andCivil Code of Baden. There was much less contractual liberty under the BGB, andit strictly defined the alternative forms of marital property relations in such a mannerthat women were still left powerless. In addition to this, the state discouragedprenuptial agreements through a host of red-tape measures. Couples had to providemarriage officials with a detailed list of their holdings and choose between one ofthe allowed forms under the BGB. In addition, such agreements had to be registeredbefore the time of marriage in the local Güterrechtsregister and couples had togive public notice of their property holdings and alternative arrangements throughpublication in the newspaper. The whole community thus knew if a woman wasworth more than her mate and knew if she chose to deprive him of control over herproperty.Nevertheless, couples still tried to opt for the forms that appeared under the oldnames even though the substance of the alternative forms was changed under theBGB. As the records for the regions of Gießen and Fürth show, women marriedwith sizeable sums of personal wealth. According to the notice in the DarmstädterZeitung, in the Güterrechtsregister for the Fürth region, Eva Schneider married withsome 77,000 RM in hand in 1911. 128 A female photographer, worth more than 10,000RM, married in 1910 only after her husband agreed to accept Gütertrennung. 129In 1910, a couple from Birkenau where the wife’s property was worth 9,349 RMand the husband’s 5,100 RM opted for Errungenschaftsgemeinschaft. 130 In addition,the Güterrechtsregister also recorded detailed information about the couples’ professionallife, and it is clear from the records that even the working-class pennilesswere going through the trouble to file prenuptial agreements. A similar pattern was