Caroline Arni

By mid-twentieth century the Swiss professor of law August Egger mused about the increasing amount of divorces which sounded to him like "a melancholic song of frustrated hopes, of lost confidence, of destroyed marital happiness".¹ In doing so he displayed not only his poetic empathy with private tragedies of marital break-up. Moreover – and probably more important – he worried about what he perceived as a decline of social order caused by the seeming fragility of marital relationship. And so did many of his colleagues as for example the high court judge J. Strebel, who claimed that "every divorce is [...] an assault on the very institution of marriage itself".² Personal marital failure was politically relevant as another author expressed it explicitly: "The one who divorces participates in the destruction of marriage, family and the state." (Hans Hoppeler).

All these authors – jurists as well as politicians and interested contemporaries – worried about the constant increase of divorces, which took place most apparently against the political purpose that had informed the divorce legislation at the beginning of the 20^th century. This divorce legislation, which was part of the first national codification of civil law in Switzerland 1907/12 (Schweizerisches Zivilgesetzbuch ZGB), had replaced the relatively liberal divorce act of 1874 by a more restrictive regulation of divorce (abolishing, for example, divorce on the ground of mutual agreement of the spouses): Divorce should become more difficult to obtain, which should reduce the Swiss divorce rates, far the highest of Europe at the turn of the century.³ Yet, these politics were contrasted by the constantly growing amount of marital break-ups and by the liberal jurisdiction of local courts in protestant and urban regions (differing, however, remarkably from the jurisdiction in catholic and rural parts of Switzerland).

It should not astonish that divorcing wives and husbands were accused of destroying the state. Marriage as a highly codified social institution corresponded – as far as we know its history – throughout centuries with the order of society and gender and is to be considered as one of the most efficient institutions in establishing male power. (Cf. the example of the French monarchist and advocator of Restoration, Louis de Bonald, who, as Joan W. Scott showed, in his attack against divorce legislation sets an analogy between divorce and democracy just to let it collapse into a direct causal relation.⁴) This correspondence works not only as a political strategy of transferring social and political structure into the intimacy of individual relationships. It also shapes everyday conjugal practice and meaning of marital relationship and is, vice-versa, shaped by them: Marriage as an institution and a practice mediates social order with the experience of intimate relationship and with subjective identity. None of these issues is stable or fixed: forms of subjective identity, models of social order and of intimate relationship are constantly defined and redefined, worked and reworked, affirmed and criticized within a field of contesting claims, necessities and interpretations. Around 1900, when in Switzerland (and in Germany) civil law was codified on a national level, both the gendered order of society and intimate relationship between women and men were highly disputed. It is difficult to grasp this wide and heterogeneous discourse on marriage at the turn of the century: It holds a crucial place in emerging social sciences as well as it was a preferred topic of novels and dramas (e.g. Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Fontane, Schnitzler), it was omnipresent in feminist and present in socialist thought and movement as well as in conservative and liberal politics and in bohemian life.

The encompassing analysis of this discourse on marriage and gender relation is not the aim of my ongoing doctoral thesis, out of which I would like to present an aspect here. My primary focus is on analyzing the meanings of marital relationship exposed by wives and husbands, by witnesses (neighbors, relatives, friends), by lawyers and judges during divorce processes in the civil court of Berne, i.e. of a protestant, not big, but relatively urban town, and I do so with a microscopic temporary focus on the first decades of the 20^th century: My sources consist of 479 varyingly detailed, but always comparably well documented divorce processes of the years 1912-1916.

Whoever wanted to get a divorce in Switzerland at this time had to prove the marital break-up before the court and was therefore compelled to give an account of the marriage’s history and its present state. Wives and husbands did so in very different ways: sometimes directly addressing the judge by sophisticated or stodgily written records, sometimes mainly letting speak their lawyers and witnesses, sometimes in extensive stories, sometimes in short words. These ‚histories of marital life‘, written down in process notes and depositions, in plaints and vindications, in private letters and in autobiographical sketches, are wide and detailed records of marital and domestic life. They should, however, not be reduced to mere reproductions of events, behaviors, and misbehaviors. Following a suggestion E.P. Thompson has made many years ago, these records can instead be read as exposing norms and expectations that seem ‚natural‘ and are taken for granted in everyday life and that have to be explained and therefore become visible in an "atypical episode or situation" as a divorce is.⁵ Hence, what I try to do in my study is to read the records of marital life as representations of marital relationship and conflict that are informed by the same meanings that orientate everyday practice, the interpretation of reality and the construction of experience in conjugal life and which vary with reference to gender, class and other social categories.

Although the criterions for marital behavior are roughly codified by the law, there is a considerable scope for definitions of what should count as an acceptable marital life and what should not (the intolerableness of a marriage founding the right to divorce). The divorce court is therefore not a place where fixed norms and criterions are merely applied. Instead, the divorce process can be understood as a discursive space and social situation that generated records of conjugal relationship through which wives and husbands, lawyers and judges negotiated the form of what was thought to be a failed or an acceptable marriage.⁶

The subjectivity of judicially generated depositions and stories is therefore not an obstacle to investigation. We can, as Miranda Chaytor suggests in her study on rape processes in 17^th century court, make "the mediating narrative the object of study in its own right"⁷ and find out something about how women and men at the turn of the 20^th century interpreted intimate relationship and rendered meaningful experiences of marital joy and pain and how judges related this interpretations to the law and the politics behind this law within a scope of negotiatiable norms. Exploring both the variability and the structuration of interpretations appropriated and applied by the historical actors, I try to shed light on their scope, their contradictions and ambivalences. It is there, I would like to argue, where we may investigate possibilities and constraints of changing relations between women and men at the intersection of practice and discourse.⁸

In this paper I would like to focus on the very narrative quality of the mediating stories and on the story-tellers and take a step into the topic of our workshop. Not all genres of judicially produced documents can adequately be conceived in terms of narrativity, as Natalie Zemon Davis remarks in the introduction to her study on pardon tales in 16^th century France. Depositions of witnesses, for example, are often "chopped up into many questionings" and they normally "lack a beginning and an end".⁹ This also holds true for divorce processes at the beginning of the 20^th century. Thus, in the following I’ll focus on a special genre of documents that can be found among my sources: records of marital life written by wives and husbands that represent uninterrupted narrations with a beginning and an end and often with climaxes, describing the origins of a marriage, its development and its fall, and sometimes presented under titles such as Records of Ms Keller’s History of Marital Suffering or Picture of my wife’s character – stories of marital life in a strict sense, characterized by "shaping choices of language, detail, and order" which "are needed to present an account that seems to both writer and reader true, meaningful, and / or explanatory."¹⁰

Picking out two narrations of that kind, I would like to attempt to demonstrate that there is more at stake in these narratives than the description, interpretation and explanation of marital break-up, and that it is the intensive narrative quality of these records that points to a further issue: By choosing a particular plot, conferring a particular meaning on the stories of their marital lives, the two storytellers stabilize their masculine identities, which have been endangered by the kinds of conjugal relationship and conflict they are involved in. I would also like to open the question of how this observation could be generalized, and if records of marital life can give us an insight into the construction of subjective identity that takes place in the context of marriage as a place where the social and symbolic structure of gender and intimate relations between individual women and men intersect.

My first case is the one of the Swiss socialist leader Robert Grimm (1881-1958), son of proletarian parents and future social-democratic statesman, who was married to and divorced from Rosa Reichesberg-Schlain, a well trained Jewish Russian intellectual and revolutionary, temporarily member of Swiss communist party. Robert Grimm claimed successfully for divorce on the ground of "marital disruption" (ZGB Art. 142: Zerrüttung des ehelichen Verhältnisses). The second case I would like to present is the one of the roustabout and former shoemaker Jakob Linder (1888-?), son of a peasant and shoemaker, married to the maid Marie Linder-Gloor. Jakob Linder agreed with his wife filing for divorce but not without defending himself against her reproaches by depicting the five years of marriage under the title "Confession and events of my marital life".¹¹

What can be gained from exploring records of marital life in terms of their narrative quality? I would like to start with a naive question: Why, it could be asked, are the proofs of a marital failure not presented in form of an exhaustive list of the wife’s sins or the husband’s misbehaviors or as a diagram showing the degree of marital happiness and pain over the years? Why does Jacob Linder start the record of his marriage with the sentence: "When I was about 20 years old, I bought myself a small manor called the ‚Schäfter‘ in Niederramsern, for fr. 5'500.-."¹² And why does Robert Grimm’s account of his marital life, addressed to his friend and lawyer, begin with the prologue: "In the following I’ll try to give you the clues you need for the divorce process. Try – because despite the burning desire to finally dissolute a relationship that became my torture long ago – it disgusts me to go through all that once again and touch wounds that let the inner pain live again. If necessity was not stronger than the inner repugnance I would dash the pen away."¹³? Or, to turn the naive question more serious: What is a narrative?

The literary theorist Barbara Herrnstein-Smith gives a minimal definition of narrative discourse as "verbal acts consisting of someone telling someone else that something happened."¹⁴ Herrnstein-Smith conceptualizing narratives as acts and parts of a social transaction that can be analyzed with reference to their generating context and to the motives, interests and desires of the storyteller, I find her account of narratives particularly useful for historical investigation. The most obvious generating context of narrations such as the ones of Robert Grimm and Jacob Linder is clear: Robert Grimm files for divorce and has to proof the failure of his marriage; Jacob Linder has to defend himself against the reproaches of his wife if he wants to keep his children with him. To write down a ‚good story‘, detailed, extensive and elaborated, is, however, a particularly apt but not the only possible way to fulfill the judicial demand for an intelligible justification of divorce or for a vindication. What other generating contexts could have caused these stories and what could have been the subjective desires, motives and expectations of Robert Grimm and Jacob Linder? Or, to reformulate my question once again: Which social transactions are at stake in these narratives, what is the act the storytellers are performing, and how are they involved in their narrating?

Robert Grimm tells the story of his marriage as the failed project of a companionate marriage in the anti-bourgeois sense of an emotional, intellectual and political union of two equals instead of a an association of two substantially different and unequal sexes. He describes the origins of the relationship as the liaison between an intellectually untrained but experienced and politically active worker and a well trained in Marxist theory but lonely and underoccupied intellectual woman. What he portrays is an ideal union of individualized equals, echoing the association of theory and practice, intellectuals and workers in socialist thought and movement. Whereas, in the sequence immediately preceding, he identifies and denominates his feelings towards Rosa Grimm as mere "compassion", him feeling pity with the desperate, recently divorced women.¹⁵ Discriminating his pitiful feelings from love, Robert Grimm trivializes the emotional origin of the marriage and by that emancipates himself from a tight union. This strategy is continued in his analysis of the growing marital conflicts: Ascribing them to his wife’s reluctance to acknowledge his constant progress in theoretical training, which reduced her educational prominence, he displays his intellectual emancipation. Robert Grimm’s story of his marriage is the story of an emotional and intellectual emancipation, the story-telling itself (writing his emotional distance into the origin of the marriage and presenting it at the very beginning of his record) being part of this emancipation.

Jacob Linder was less ambitious in planning his marriage: The beginning of his story does not point to a complicated psychological constellation but to the solid founding of a household and a family, describing not only his own industriousness but even tracing it back to his forefathers. Despite his hard working, his shoemaking business failed due to malicious creditors and the pressing concurrence of the shoemaking industry, and at a certain point he had to give it all up and left his family to work and earn money in Germany. Comparing to the extensive description of this material failure, his notes on marital life are thin: He never felt the "right love" towards his wife, which he had found through the intermediation of a friend and married on the pressure of his parents, and though he "always" kept thinking, "that it may change in one or the other direction", this actually happened, "but not in the way I hoped for during the first years."¹⁶ Due to this primordial lack of love and due to a corporeal defect of his wife, sexual intercourse as well as common walks on Sundays were constantly reduced and finally given up. Only in the end and in one sentence we learn that his wife "went with others and one slept at hers and one even brought some of his things with him and wants to marry her".¹⁷

Robert Grimm and Jacob Linder give accounts of their personal and marital life course selecting and weighting significant events and developments, sequencing them along a chronological and logical order and shaping them along a plot, shortly: narrating. Through these narrations both authors interpret and confer meaning on their experience of marital life, they create sense in a way that can be created only by a narrative offering the possibility of construing linearity, continuity, coherence and meaning. I would like to read these narratives as autobiographical narratives that work in a way Pierre Bourdieu observed: "On est sans doute en droit de supposer que le récit autobiographique s’inspire toujours, au moins pour une part, du souci de donner de sens, de rendre raison, de dégager une logique à la fois rétrospective et prospective, une consistance et une constance, en établissant des relations intelligibles, comme celle de l’effet à la cause efficiente ou finale, entre les états successifs, ainsi constitués en étapes d’un développement nécessaire."¹⁸ Robert Grimm’s marriage could not other than fail considering its rooting in mere compassion on his side and in emotional dependence on him on her side and considering his intellectual emancipation; Jacob Linder’s household must have failed considering his original lack of love as well as the exploitary behavior of his creditors and the monopolizing strategies of shoemaking industry.

This is what the two authors tell and we must – being historians, not judges in the divorce court in search for the guilty part – take these stories serious, not as self-excuses for the husbands misbehaviors – although they may have had, of course, have this function too – but as acts of interpretation, and I would then like to ask why the authors interpret their experience in exactly that way. Or to put it in other words: What is the meaning of these interpretations?

Robert Grimm’s story becomes clearer when we consider what Pierre Bourdieu calls the "surface social"¹⁹ as the diachronic and synchronic state of the field ("champs social") in which the actor is situated. Two fields have to be considered here: the ‚private‘ one of anti-bourgeois companionate marriage and the ‚public‘ one of socialist and Swiss politics. These two fields are interdependent and their intersection in the case of Robert Grimm explains, as I would like to argue, his narration: The years between 1908 and 1916 are not only the years of the Grimm’s marriage but also a period of intensive political conflict in Switzerland during which Swiss socialist movement radicalized its positions and its activity under the leadership of Robert Grimm. The aggressive and militant tone of political conflict in this period stressed the masculinity of politics and of political leadership and it was not by accident that at the same time the social democratic party began – successfully – to integrate unions of female workers into its own organizational structure and politics.²⁰ It was exactly this manliness that was endangered in Robert Grimm’s case: Principally every emotional relationship, but more intensively the anti-bourgeois concept of a relation of two equals, both engaged with the same political work, undermines what since the 18^th century counts as the foundation of masculinity: individual autarchy, independence and substantial difference from woman whose capacity to individualize, to autonomize and to participate in public was denied.²¹ I would therefore suggest to read Robert Grimm’s emancipative story of his marriage as a narrative liberation from a relationship that undermined the masculinity he needed to be a socialist leader and to become a future member of Swiss political establishment which was characterized – deeply rooting not only in republicanism but also in its gendered feature – by a persistent manliness:²² He is and has always been, so his story goes, the virtuous and independent man that is a militant socialist and can become a respectable statesman.

Masculine identity is also at stake in Jacob Linder’s narration. Marie Linder-Gloor justifies her demand for divorce with her husband’s adulterous behavior and his going to Germany, leaving her with four children on her own and without any financial resources. While frankly admitting his lack of love and not loosing many words neither on that nor on the adulterous behavior of his wife and not entering at all into the question of his own adulteries, Jacob Linder extensively and scrupulously exposes his business failure. This emphasis points to the enjeu of his account: By explaining his financial and business break-down with much detail and with reference to factors external to his industrious self, he displays ex negativo his personal ability of being a good family father characterized by the capacity for financially maintaining a family. Similarly ex negativo he qualifies himself as a potentially good husband: Overtly regretting his lack of love to this particular woman that is his wife, he demonstrates that he knows the significance of love for marital relation and that he is principally willed to give love. These qualities of a husband and family father are obviously put into question by him being replaced as a loving and earning husband by another man "who even brought some of his things" into the former marital household and "wants to marry" his wife. What both, Robert Grimm and Jacob Linder, display before the court is a masculinity that is intact despite the marital failure or the failure of maintaining a household, ascribing these failures to the unreckonable will of Amor, to the misbehaviors of the partner, or to the social and economic circumstances outside themselves and outside the marriage.

This interpretation draws on various theories of the self and identity. The self is not a stable ontological or essential thing, it is "not a substance, a material entity that we can somehow grab hold of and place before our eyes."²³ Instead it is the outcome of practice and of ideas of who and how one should or can be. It is a matter of meaning and interpretation within specific social, cultural and political contexts. Moreover, a sense of one’s self is not something that one reaches at a certain point in his life course and never looses again unless he or she gets mad. If self in modern western society is – in its hegemonic form – understood and lived as self-identical personhood characterized by coherence and continuity, this is the outcome of both a specific historical process – whose genealogy can be written – and of a constant social and individual production through acts and interpretations in everyday life.²⁴ Identity is, as Jürgen Straub states, "an always provisional result of creative, constructive acts, one could even say: it is made for the moment".²⁵ Although I do not fully agree with this strong programme in that it neglects institutional maintenance of identity,²⁶it helps to understand identity as a fluid processing and to identify possible acts and arenas of identity construction. These constructive acts, Straub continues, can be mediated and expressed by various ways, among which story-telling holds a crucial place. In the same vein Paul Ricoeur calls attention to narration as a privileged form of self-interpretation and of making the self and life course intelligible, when he introduces the notion of "narrative identity".²⁷ As "symbolized account of actions of human beings that has a temporal dimension [...] held together by recognizable patterns of events called plots"²⁸ narrative can do the work that has to be done in the construction of a coherent and continuous personhood: Through story-telling human beings confer meaning on their experiences and actions, locate them in time and space, make sense of themselves and the others. The act Robert Grimm and Jacob Linder are performing by their story-telling consists in interpreting their marital life and failure in a way that stabilizes their masculine identity and constitutes them as masculine subjects.

From an interpretative perspective on society and history it should be clear that this vision of the self does not state the pure fictitiousness of the self or even its falsehood. From my viewpoint it would be inadequate to judge the stories of Robert Grimm and Jacob Linder as true or false. Yet, this was the business of the judge and this business was the context of the authors writing their stories. If those stories could not be told without fiction in the sense Natalie Zemon Davis describes as "the crafting of a narrative"²⁹, they are told in the context of a judicial negotiation of what can be judged as a ‘true’ account of the marital life as opposite to a lie, to a fictional account. They have to claim to be true, and they claim to be acknowledged as such. They are told to be heard and to be believable, and in this sense they are part of a social transaction that encompasses in these cases not only the devolution of the divorce process but also the production of masculine selves: Narrative identity is not exclusively individual, but draws on shared, collective patterns of meanings and has to be socially intelligible and acknowledged. Individual life stories therefore certainly have a creative dimension, but they are also shaped by what counts as plausible and meaningful in a certain society and culture, what is recognizable as a plot that makes sense, and they are therefore woven into relations of power.³⁰ It is not astonishing then, that the judges – finally more intuitively than by reasoning – consent to Robert Grimm’s story while actually not facing Rosa Grimm’s account who – contrarily to her husband and due to feminist thought – indeed did have recourse to female identities alternative to the hegemonic bourgeois model. However, this acceptance/rejection was not unproblematic, not even for the court. The Grimm’s stories led to an extensive, elaborated and most instructive consideration from the judge court, meditating not only about the ‘truth’ of this marriage but also about the principal imponderability of what could actually count as the ‘truth’ of any marriage.

Hence, not only the criterions of what counts as an acceptable marriage are negotiated before the divorce court but also what can be presented and acknowledged or rejected as respectable identities. And not always is the result of the judicial contemplation as foreseeable as in the Grimm’s case. Maybe the analyze of divorce records from this perspective may allow insights into the possibilities and constraints of social and individual construction of the self where intimate relation between individual women and men, social order and gender politics intersect. Maybe this sort of analyze may contribute to a ‘microscopic’ investigation of how experience through interpretation constitutes subjects.³¹ And perhaps it allows to explore further an assumption Paul Ricoeur formulates: that in the constitution of narrative identity – be it of a community or of an individual – lies a "place to search for the fusion between history and fiction".³²

Presenting work in progress and far away from having explored everything that could be explored here, I would nevertheless like to present and discuss some conclusions and open questions in my workshop presentation.