The
uncertainties of winning independence
Longer
education, more problems finding a job, the end of parental authority... A number of
changes explain why, in recent years, entry into adulthood may be slow in coming and no
longer necessarily coincides with starting a first job, leaving home or moving in with a
partner. By Emmanuel Thévenon, journalist
"You’re so
sweet... If you want, you can stay at home all your life..." Gazing at Tanguy, their
newborn son, Paul and Edith do not imagine how prophetic this declaration of love would
prove to be. Twenty-eight years later, Tanguy is still there! Brilliant, charming and
attractive, he is completing a thesis on China, but continues to live with his parents
where he is perfectly happy. His progenitors are going to do everything they can to make
this eternal adolescent tire of being under their roof. In vain.
The screenplay of
Tanguy, the film by Etienne Chatiliez (2001), one of France’s biggest recent popular
hits which has attracted an audience of over 4 million, testifies to this changing
definition of "youth", that age of transition between childhood and adulthood,
which now tends to be prolonged. Forty or fifty years ago, young people couldn’t wait
to leave home as soon as possible, in order to become independent.
According to the French
National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee), half of all men born
between 1963 and 1966 finished their education before the age of eighteen. Three years
later they left their parents’ home before obtaining a steady job, at the age of
twenty-two.
Today, longer
schooling, economic uncertainty and a less authoritarian upbringing are tending to delay
each of these stages. For half of all boys, there is a gap of at least eight years between
finishing their education (after the age of twenty-two) and the birth of their first
child. This means that, for statistical bodies, "young people" now constitute
the proportion of the population aged between sixteen (the end of compulsory schooling in
France) and twenty-nine. Girls leave the family home or live with a partner two years
earlier than boys on average, and they reach the next stage more quickly (in less than six
years).
The level of
education is rising
Since the 1960s young
people have been leaving the French education system increasingly better qualified. Today,
more than 60% achieve the Baccalaureat and more than 50% go on to higher education,
compared to less than 30% at the beginning of the 1980s. "This longer
schooling," explains sociologist Olivier Galland, "of course has a knock-on
effect on the age at which other thresholds are crossed. This is evident from the age at
which people enter working life. The proportion of boys working at the age of eighteen
fell from 81% in 1954 to 15% in 1993." Longer education also delays, although to a
lesser extent, the age at which people leave home, form couples and new family units (see
article "Family and friends").
First and foremost, for
young people it is a matter of holding back the spectre of unemployment which affects them
almost twice as much as their elders. Among young people aged between fifteen and
twenty-nine and available for work, unemployment has oscillated between 19% and 25% for
the last ten years, compared with only 6% in 1975. However, for this age group as a whole
the rate falls to 10% because of widespread involvement in higher education, since a
degree is still the best insurance against unemployment. In 2002 more than 80% of young
graduates questioned by Apec (the French national executive employment agency) had a job;
and of those who did not, only 3% had been looking for one for over a year.
A more gradual
start to working life
Another characteristic
of young people on the job market is that they are, especially between the ages of twenty
and twenty-four, over-represented in temporary, insecure and badly paid jobs. Completing
their education no longer automatically leads to a secure job, but to a variable length of
time spent in search of work, "menial jobs" and often unpaid work experience
intended to give them the experience that employers demand of new entrants. Furthermore,
in general they start their working lives in jobs requiring lower qualifications than
their actual level of education.
During their education,
French young people benefit from a great many government measures: grants, housing
benefits, family allowance up to the age of twenty or more, tax relief for parents of
children in full-time education, etc. In 2000-2001, the various forms of financial aid
awarded to students in higher education (grants, educational allowances) affected 475,000
people. However, most of them received a relatively modest amount, since the annual total
has a ceiling of 3,456 euros.
Families make an even
larger contribution. "Students," explains Vincenzo Cicchelli, author of La
Construction de l’autonomie [The Building of Independence], "receive significant
financial assistance from their parents, often constituting the majority of the resources
available to them." Very frequently, the retired also help to support their
grandchildren or encourage their independence. Family solidarity between the generations
offsets the global stagnation of the under-thirties’ standard of living observed in
French society over the last fifteen years.
Staying in
adolescence: choice or no choice?
Although they may leave
home relatively young, students tend not to move in with a partner immediately, even after
they have obtained a secure job. Young people first give themselves a period of
experimentation before setting up a new family unit. This is a time for going out with
"mates" and having passing love affairs... On the other hand, once part of a
couple (without being married for one young person in two aged between fifteen and
twenty-nine), the arrival of a child occurs two to three years later on average, whatever
the level of education.
The situation is very
different for less well-educated young people, who remain at home with their parents well
beyond the end of their education. Half the boys who finish their schooling before
obtaining a certificate of vocational aptitude (CAP) live in the family home for at least
six years before becoming independent. A quarter even stay at home for over ten years!
Usually against their will. Insecurity prevents them from renting a home of their own or
living with a partner.
This never-ending
adolescence arises from the difficulty of finding a secure job when you are young and
poorly qualified. Adolescents go through a series of menial jobs, training or preparation
for work courses and recurrent periods of unemployment... before landing a permanent post.
Not only the social environment, but also the circle of family and friends will then be
decisive in enabling young people to get out of what they call the "galère" [a
Catch-22], which hits young people from working-class areas in the outer suburbs in
particular.
"The psychosocial
consequences of prolonging this state of dependency to an advanced age have,
unfortunately, not yet been the subject of any significant work," regrets Olivier
Galland.
A new
relationship with work
As the effect of a
number of factors – more uncertain economic circumstances and less stable job
prospects, the triumph of the consumer and leisure society together with the promotion of
values stressing self-development – young people today generally perceive work in a
utilitarian way while expressing new demands. Self-fulfilment, novelty and mobility are
valued more highly than investment in the service of one company for the whole of
one’s working life. More independent and hedonistic, young people today see the key
to a successful life in a balance between work and personal life. The Editorial Staff
Grants to help
young people integrate
In the face of the
problem of youth unemployment, the French government has made major efforts to
re-establish the value of apprenticeship and to lighten the burden of social contributions
for companies taking on unqualified young people. The State has also developed – with
relative success – a whole series of integration and job-start schemes: public
service work (TUC), then jobs-solidarity contracts (CES), consolidated job contracts
(CEC), the Trace programme (Access to Work Path)... The most recent, the "social
integration contract" (Civis) is due to come on stream at the beginning of 2004.
Designed to replace the youth employment contract, it will be offered to people aged
between sixteen and twenty-five with at most the Baccalaureat and who have plans to work
in the social, humanitarian or citizenship areas. E.T
An
inventory of emotions
The voice of her generation: in her
stories Judith Hermann creates intense snapshots
By Jörg Magenau
It seems that virtually
everything has been written about Judith Hermann. So beautiful, so sad, so perfect was her
book of stories "Summerhouse, Later", that it even made its readers more
beautiful and sadder. And the author gazed from the cover of her book so beautifully and
so sadly, it was impossible to tell whether it was the stories or the enigmatic portrait
that so impressed the experts. On television she could be seen sitting smoking at tables
in coffee houses, and even she herself seemed somewhat baffled by the stupendous, rather
inexplicable success. After all, not every storybook sells 350,000 copies or is translated
into 15 different languages, simply because the tales are beautiful and sad.
Then, after four years of silence and still no new book by Judith Hermann, people started
saying she must have writer’s block. The chorus of malevolent tongues grew louder
when the young writer received the Kleist Award in autumn 2001. Suddenly she had joined
the ranks of such renowned authors as Anna Seghers who was also awarded this prize as a
young woman. This recognition more or less obliged her to follow up her first book with a
second. But Judith Hermann still refused to let herself be bulldozed into the seasonal
production cycles of the book industry. She took her time, the time needed for the texts
to emerge and mature. For a whole year she wrote nothing at all. She had to regain her
detachment and return to the point devoid of expectations that is so essential in the
creative writing process. She gave birth to a child – there are more important things
than literature.
But now her second book
has appeared. "Nichts als Gespenster" (Nothing but Ghosts) is a collection of
seven stories, each as sad and perfect as the next. The book shot to number one in the
bestseller lists. The publishers sold 150,000 copies within four months – a
phenomenon that cannot be explained simply in literary terms. Judith Hermann, who was born
in 1970, presents the portrait of an unattached generation and provides a careful
inventory of the emotional atmosphere around the turn of the century. It seems that her
characters, usually couples, live their lives in parallel rather than together and offer
readers great scope for identification. Judith Hermann tells of the loneliness as a
couple, of strangeness despite proximity, of projections that evoke the illusion of love,
and of love itself which vanishes as soon as it seems within grasp. Melancholy and as if
in a dream, these characters wander through the world as uncertainly as the author herself
who is overcome by a fit of stage-fright every time she is about to read in public. When
she starts reading she quivers from head to toe. Her voice trembles. But after a few
minutes she is at one with the text and safely back on an even keel.
Nobody could have
predicted that Judith Hermann would become the most successful young German author. After
graduating from school she studied philosophy in Berlin but gave it up after one and a
half years. She then started studying the piano, but that only lasted for one and a half
years too. She already suffered from stage fright as a budding pianist – so writing
looked like a reasonable alternative as you can withdraw to do that. She went to a school
of journalism to learn the art of reporting. The head of her seminar was Alexander Osang,
a star in the journalistic fraternity. He announced that she had written the worst
journalistic contribution and she never wrote another piece there again. This was followed
by a stay in New York, where she did an internship with the Jewish weekly newspaper
"Aufbau." She worked for radio and applied for a scholarship at the
Literarisches Colloquium Berlin in 1997. The seminar was lead by writers Katja
Lange-Müller and Burkhard Spinnen, who helped her put the final touches to her first
stories.
Another life in
another place?
The quotation Judith
Hermann chose to precede the stories in her second book comes from the Beach Boys and
sounds quite confident: "Wouldn’t it be nice if we could live here make this the
kind of place where we belong." That pinpoints the theme: to have a place that you
want to make your own. A sense of belonging. But these verses also express the opposite,
because they are written in the knowledge that this is not going to happen. This is how
tourists travel the world. They sit in a harbour bar gazing along the coast and wondering
what it would be like to live in a house with a swimming pool and terrace on top of the
cliffs and spend a lifetime looking out to sea. "Wouldn’t it be nice?"
Maybe we travel and read because we need these mental experiments – playing with the
idea of what life would be like living somewhere else. This gives us the strength, when
the deadline arrives, to return to our own existence.
Judith Hermann has travelled widely over the past few years. The Goethe Institute invited
her to read in Iceland, Norway and Paris, places that also occur in her stories. But, in
the end, the actual locations are irrelevant. The atmosphere that emerges is always the
same, and it has less to do with the places than with the characters who act as its medium
of transport. They are not the usual kind of travellers. They do not aim for specific
resorts, luxury, sun, sightseeing. They only stop for a short break somewhere to sleep or
to smoke a cigarette. They like smoking, and they smoke a lot, with deep drags, the same
as when people in need of relaxation take in deep breaths of fresh mountain air.
Images with
depth
In the title story
there is a strange encounter in a hotel bar, in the heart of the desert in Nevada. A local
inhabitant, who apparently has never left the confines of the small settlement, wants to
hear something about the life back home of the young German woman, Ellen, as it must be
very unusual. Ellen says to him: "It’s not unusual. Many people live like this.
They travel and take a look at the world, then they return and work, and when they’ve
earned enough money, they take off again to somewhere else. Most of them. Most of the
people live like that." Of course this is nonsense. But in these stories anyone who
asks a specific question, about a task or a profession, gets no reply from Judith
Hermann’s heroines. At least Felix, Ellen’s companion through the desert,
indicates that he is a bicycle mechanic. That is about the steadiest middle-class
occupation imaginable. It goes without saying that a total lack of career aspirations also
belongs to the travellers’ utopia.
Judith Hermann records
all this with the cool, accurate precision of a camera that is able to capture atmospheres
and moods. She creates tension solely by focusing on people. What is happening is visible
on the surface, but it emerges from a great depth. The images the author produces have an
incredible depth of focus, and there is a foreground and background in every individual.
Judith Hermann’s calm language grips the reader and, after just a few sentences, does
not let go again. It deals unemotionally with emotions. All of her stories revolve around
the briefest of moments, a scene, a picture, captured instantaneously through the lens.
But she knows that these moments are as impossible to capture as the ghosts in the title
story, the lost souls that wander around the hotel in the Nevada desert. The photos that a
quirky female ghostbuster shows the traveller at the hotel bar one night convey nothing
but blurred, badly exposed images. But Judith Hermann has the gift of condensing the vague
apparitions into clear contours. She doggedly describes the moment when the diffuse
everyday perception of existence suddenly turns into a clear, sharp sensation, confirming
a possibility of belonging, of security, of feeling at home. "Wouldn’t it be
nice?" But this sensation does not last for long. And so, the next story has to
begin. It makes you more beautiful and sadder.
Literature
Telegram
The book trade:
totalling 90,000 new publications and reprints a year, Germany ranks third after Great
Britain and China in an international book production comparison.
Publishers: 3,700
publishers ensure diversity. The largest publishing cities are Munich, Berlin and
Frankfurt am Main.
Book fairs: the
Frankfurt Book Fair in October is the world’s biggest rendezvous for this sector. It
was joined this spring by the Leipzig Book Fair which previously concentrated more on the
national market.
Price fixing: apart
from pharmacies, the book trade is the only economic sector in Germany legally entitled to
fix the retail price of its products. This means that books cost the same everywhere.
Licences: each year,
German publishers sell around 5,300 licences abroad, while 9,300 are purchased abroad with
70 percent from the USA and Britain.
(Courtesy:
Deutschland Magazine, Embassy of Germany, Kathmandu) |
