The Hindu Business Line : Germany's baby bust

ONE spring-like summer morning, as I was settling down to work in my Frankfurt office, Brigitte Wimmer, my Secretary for 10 years, usually bursting with ideas and energy, came in looking sullen and downcast and handed in her resignation. Brigitte and her husband Peter Wimmer, were married for 14 years and had no children. They were among the thousands of dual career couples in Germany with a lot of money and little desire to be restricted by responsibility.

So, the couple had decided to break out of the rut and move to Berlin's hip Prenzlauer Berg, where they would live on the modest earnings of Peter's new job as a salesman, a price they were willing to pay to start a family.

Germany's birth rate is plunging. Yet, amid the grim statistics, numerous reports have claimed that the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood had found the magic formula for raising the country's birth rate.

If the magic of Prenzlauer Berg could be bottled and marketed, not only would Germany become the world's hippest nation, but could also waylay its darkest fear — that there will soon be no young people to care and pay for its fast-aging population.

Germany's post-Second World War Chancellor, Mr Konrad Adenauer, once famously remarked that the government did not need to offer lavish benefits for families because "Germans will always have children." How wrong he was! Now, one-third of German women are childless, which is the highest rate of childlessness in the world. Germany's current birth rate is half what it was 40 years ago. A grey wave is slowly overtaking the population. Those in the federal finance office are struggling to figure out how the country's social net — which depends on young workers taking over from the elders and paying for their retirements — will survive the imbalance.

`What is preventing Germans from procreating?' is the question raised by German polling institutes such as the prestigious Forsa and Allensbach institutes. In their interview with 40,000 Germans for 44 per cent the reason was non-availability of a partner. Thirty-nine per cent (and 45 per cent of those with at least one child) said they weren't bearing children for fear of losing their jobs.

And an astonishing three-fourths said life with children was hard in a nation that was not child-friendly. A meagre 9 per cent of those without children and 21 per cent of those with children said lack of decent childcare prevented them from conceiving. What is more, 40-45 per cent of women with university degrees in Germany were childless. A report by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg found similar trends in Europe's population, and predicted that it would decline by more than a fifth by the middle of the century unless fertility rates improved sharply.

The European Union's current 25 members would see the bloc's population starting to decline in 2025. The EU would gain 13 million inhabitants from the 456.8 million registered in 2004, taking this figure to a staggering 470.1 million in 2025.

The increase is mainly attributed to immigration. Between 2025 and 2050, the 25-nation EU would shed 20 million inhabitants and its population will be 449.8 million. In the coming decades, the number of working age people would drop from 67.4 per cent of the total population in 2004 to 56.7 per cent in 2050, registering a drop of 52 million people.

The percentage of elderly people would nearly double from 16.4 per cent of the population in 2004 to 29.9 per cent in 2050. The Strasbourg Council's study found that the EU's new Eastern members were already seeing a decline in their populations. In 2004, the populations of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia were dropping. By 2024 the populations of Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain will also have stopped growing, and by 2050 Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands will have begun to decline.

By mid-century, only Ireland, Sweden, Malta, Luxembourg, and Cyprus will still be seeing their populations grow. The numbers have sent European nations into a flutter over all these happy empty nests.

Demographic researchers have high-tailed it to Prenzlauer Berg to uncover this region's secret. Their results show thatthe number of babies in Prenzlauer Berg is on the rise — there were 1,300 newborns in 2004, compared to 900 in 1993. Yet, per capita, Prenzlauer Berg is actually one of the city's and nation's least fertile districts. So what explains the baby boom? One is greater presence of women of childbearing age. One child to a woman seemed to be the norm here. By contrast, women had an average of 1.37 children across the nation.

The town is called Kloppenburg and it is in rural, tradition-bound northwest Germany. Many of the women in this sparsely populated region of 150,500 quit school, married young and don't have jobs. But this doesn't explain why babies are not born elsewhere in Germany. Perhaps people just don't want to have children anymore. Still, many feel guilty if they don't because it is still socially expected of people to have children, regardless of what they want.

It seems Prenzlauer Berg's miracle fertility formula is: don't get an education, marry early and live on a farm. Hardly a lucrative life plan.

In Europe, could society be the cause for many women's aversion to motherhood? Being a mother is too much pressure for many women, in addition to being the perfect wife and successful career woman.

In Germany, there is a particularly nasty phrase often attached to working mothers — "Rabenmutters," or inattentive, unloving, "unnatural" mothers. Maybe all of this pressure has pushed women to make a choice. Rather than being bad mothers, they are simply choosing not to be mothers at all.

(The author is a former Europe Director, CII, and lives in Cologne, Germany. Feedback may be sent to mohan.murti@t-online.de)

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