Verliebt, Verlobt, Verheiratet. Eine Geschichte der Ehe seit der Romantik by Monika Wienfort (review)

The Romantics, we are often told, invented modern marriage. Marriage is no longer about carrying on ancestral lines, or about doing someone else’s will, no longer about staying in one’s group, or about bettering one’s lot in life. No, marriage is about one’s own inclinations in dialogue with those of another human being. In Verliebt, Verlobt, Verheiratet, her Geschichte der Ehe seit der Romantik, the historian Monika Wienfort shows that this story is not wrong but is far too simple. Her detailed, exhaustively researched, and eminently readable history of marriage tells the story of what marriage has meant at different points over the last two hundred years through what marriage has encompassed during that time. From the marriage brokerage to the church service, from the bridal shower to the widow’s veil, Wienfort presents the story of marriage as a breathtaking mosaic.

Wienfort’s book seems intent on avoiding grand sweeping narratives, and with good reason: little in the legal standing and definition of marriage changed in the period she considers, at least until the caesura of the Nuremberg Race Laws. Wienfort wants to show that the institution and practice of marriage nevertheless transformed fundamentally during the same period, and that means attending to the ins and outs of marital life: who takes whose name, who disciplines the children, the consequences of divorce, the mores around widowhood. Underneath a seemingly stable concept hid an unruly and frequently contradictory swirl of practices, prejudices, and ideologies.

It is to the book’s great credit that it abandons itself to that swirl. Wienfort presents the story of marriage in specific vignettes, organizing her book not around a chronological account but instead following the “biography” of a prototypical marriage from choosing a partner via wedding, married life, and parenting to widowhood. Her sources come from diaries and court documents, from literature and legislation; and Wienfort is attuned to the way these can point in very different directions at one and the same point in time. This way of proceeding turns out to be a bit of a masterstroke, because it helps account for the almost staggering nonsimultaneity (Ungleichzeitigkeit) that defined marital practice in Germany. It is through this gambit that we learn not only how early divorce enters into the picture in Germany but also how, by comparison, discrimination of single mothers continued well into the postwar period.

At the same time, the attention lavished on the phenomena that surround marriage—ceremonies, procreation, inheritance, and the like—leaves the central category, that of marriage, oddly empty. Wienfort opens her book by quoting Friedrich Schlegel’s assertion that love and marriage are effectively indistinct, but she does not follow up on the suggestion that underlies Schlegel’s assertion. Clearly Schlegel is not saying that what goes by the name “marriage” in his world is the same as being in a love relationship. No, his statement implies that he has some kind of “true” marriage in mind, and that many, if not most, marriages of his day, do not live up to its standard. Wienfort assumes that the term “marriage” had attained great stability in the nineteenth century, but her own examples suggest that this may not have been so.

In little vignettes interspersed throughout the book, Wienfort checks in with five famous couples: Caroline and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Clara Wieck and Robert Schumann, Friedrich III and Victoria, Freya and Helmut James von Moltke, and Thomas Mann and Katia Pringsheim. These biographical sketches of married life, while they often tread familiar ground, work well in iteration: The way patterns emerge and eventually ebb is eloquent testament to the gradual nature of the shifts that determine the history of the institution of marriage since the early nineteenth century.

While her choice is at least partly motivated by the detailed records these married couples left of their coupledom, it does serve to keep the spotlight...