Hannah Lühmann, Susanne Schirdewahn und Dita Zipfel über Mutterschaft, weibliche Solidarität und falsche Verbündete

In the organizer's words:

One of the great promises of our time and Western society is the compatibility of career and family for women. Quite a few despair at the pressure of expectations to successfully reconcile both. No wonder, then, that the gender care gap, i.e. the gap between the unpaid care work performed by men and women, is 76 minutes a day. The temptation may be great: What would it be like to only have to do justice to one of the two tasks?

In Hannah Lühmann's novel "Heimat", a young mother of two succumbs to the spell of a right-wing influencer, a "tradwife". Jana is frustrated; after moving to a smart city housing estate in a small town, she feels lonely in her middle-class life. She enviously follows the supposedly perfect and seemingly simple life of her neighbor Karoline, a housewife and mother of five with a house on the edge of the forest, on Instagram. Jana's initial irritation at her new friend's ultra-conservative attitudes turns into fascination. Until the point at which both their lives and all certainties are shattered.

Dita Zipfel's novel "Es ist hell und draußen dreht sich die Welt" is also about motherhood. Eva, a mother of two, unintentionally pregnant with her third child, and Linn, involuntarily childless, spend a week at the seaside with their partners. Linn is torn between her unconditional desire to become a mother and her doubts as to whether she can be a "good" mother at all. With a mixture of envy and disgust, she looks at Eva, who patiently digs with her son, comforts him and wipes grains of sand out of her baby's eyes. Over the course of the vacation days, between whispered conversations and secret smoking of pot, a closeness develops that shakes up entrenched images. Eva and Linn gently shift the rules and become allies.

In Susanne Schirdewahn's novel "Karacho", Kira, an artist in her mid-forties, lives in Berlin with her husband Vau and two teenage sons. One day he says goodbye with the words: I don't love you anymore. As if that wasn't enough, he also has a new girlfriend, younger and soon pregnant. Kira has to fall out of love, but how can she do that after 20 years of marriage? Kira struggles through everyday life, does further training, has new and returning lovers. She tries to be a good mother and realizes that although she never wanted to separate, she feels relief with every day of separation. At some point she realizes that it is high time to take courage and let life happen without holding back.

NDR culture editor Joachim Dicks presents this evening about being a woman and a mother in the present day.

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