The Agonies of Choice: Gender, the Family, and Individualization in Birgit Vanderbeke's Das Muschelessen

Abstract

The massive changes that took place over a decade ago at the end of the Cold War with the unification of Germany and the collapse of Eastern European communism left virtually nothing in the lives of the citizens from the former GDR unaffected. With breathtaking speed one economic system was replaced by another, new political and legal systems were installed, and new social ground rules were imposed on the East German population. The social impact of these structural changes, which, in the words of sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, are attributable to sudden surges in (9), was immense and profound. In particular, the individualized society into which East Germans were inserted posed unprecedented challenges to love, marriage, and the family (Bauman, The Individualized Society). As GDR biographies were removed from their socialist life worlds and exposed to the vagaries of choice and the free market economy, the domains of love, marriage, and the nuclear family were also transformed in a myriad of ways. As these individualization processes accelerated with the exposure to what Zygmunt Bauman refers to eponymously as liquid modernity, there were colossal pressures on individuals and their families to maximize their opportunities for success and happiness in the West. Unification appeared to herald a new era of free choice in which individuals were able to avail themselves of the greater range of consumer goods and lifestyles. The advent of greater personal freedoms, however, also exacerbated the pressures on individuals and families to make the right choices in their lives, choices, for instance, that would increase their chances of success and help them attain the necessary accoutrements of status and class as quickly as possible. Not only were families swept up by a compulsion to consume (Hettlage and Lenz 191), they were also caught up in the race to acquire – and not merely of the economic kind. To succeed in the West they had to acquire the other less tangible forms of capital that, according to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, represent key markers of distinction and difference in the modern world: social, cultural, and symbolic (The Field of Cultural Production). The agonies of choice that this race precipitated were to change drastically the nature of families and irrevoc-