Frauen

is repeated for kilometres reveals that it is not
hedonistic trendsetters who live here but those
who have lost their connection to society. Marzahn
is not a slum. The poverty is not visible but
when free meals are distributed in front of the
parish hall there is a lengthy queue. One person
in four is unemployed.
“Marie”, a job advice centre for women, is located
on the ground floor of a bare housing block.
Karin Gaulke is confronted every day here with
the classic symptoms of political change: unemployment,
debts, and the pointlessness of
life. But she has made much the same observations
as Danka in Lučenec: that in some way
or other women deal with a crisis more productively.
“Women work all the time in any case,
at least in the home”, says Gaulke, “they have
something to do, and they don’t feel superfluous
so quickly.”
In Marzahn many women worked in technical
jobs before the collapse of the political system.
They were skilled metal workers or stood at a
lathe. But overnight they have taken off the
image of the Amazon at a machine just like an
old shirt. At times the counsellor is irritated by
how quickly this happens, by how willing her clients
are to retrain in classic women’s jobs such
as sales person or secretary. In the GDR one sort
of “slipped into” technical training, without really
wanting to, and one could not really choose
want one wanted, Gaulke is often told. She finds
only one possible explanation for this strange
phenomenon. For women in the GDR the “technical”
aspect of the job was often just a formality,
in many cases so called “female engineers”
were just assistants without any responsibility,
and without the power to make decisions. Or
they were responsible for classic female niches:
recording working hours, the archives, or the
culture department. After the political changes
women did not have much to lose. There was
more to be gained if one could reinvent oneself.
It was easy to let go. Easier than for those who
really were forced to awaken from the dream of
a secure self-image: the men.
Against this background it is not surprising that
what causes the unemployed women in Marzahn
the greatest difficulty these days is their
husbands’ unemployment. The fact that the men
cannot cope with the emptiness, that they might
let themselves go, or fall off the bandwagon. “I
can manage” they tell the counsellor, “ but what
should I do if my husband starts to drink?”. To
see how justified this fear is one only has to travel
a little further northeast. Trees on the left, trees
on the right, in the middle the space in between.
This is Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the broad,
flat region on the Baltic that has Germany’s highest
unemployment rate and, at the same time,
the greatest surplus of men. These two facts are
related. The unemployed men have resigned to
their fate and have stayed here. The unemployed
women have pulled themselves up by their
bootlaces and have moved west to find something
new.
What is the effect on a society when there are
only 85 young women for 100 men? One can
gain some idea by taking a look at the statistics:
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has the lowest
life expectancy in the whole of Germany, at the
same time it also has the highest number of fatal
road accidents and the highest rate of alcoholrelated
liver disease.
In Lučenec, too, not everything is ideal since the
women started commuting to Austria to work;
there is tension in families, injured sensibilities
and distortions of the traditional role images,
which people talk about only with embarrass-
ment. Not every male ego can deal with waiting
with a mop in the hand until his wife finally arrives
home. And not every nurse can cope with
the guilty conscience that she carries with her
all the time when she is travelling. “ I know that
at home people tease my husband about what
I do in Vienna”, says Danka. She is troubled
by doubts about whether she should leave her
children alone for so long, about whether she
should not have sat at the sickbed of her old mother
rather than looking after a stranger in Vienna.
She thinks about how this could affect her
marriage. The work is a strain on her nerves, her
body and her relationships. Danka loses four or
five kilos every fortnight she is in Austria. She
smokes five times as much as at home. But,
despite all their doubts, the women will board
the mini-bus next Saturday and drive off again.
What they do in Lučenec is an experiment born
out of a crisis, with a risk and an uncertain outcome.
But what else can they do other than take
part in it?
Sibylle Hamann is foreign correspondent for
the Austrian news magazine “profil”. Her book
“Dilettanten unterwegs. Journalismus in der
weiten Welt” has appeared in Picus-Verlag Vienna
in March 2007.
MAGAZINE FOR ARTS AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE / Women in the East and the West 9