Defender of the Family

Franz-Josef Wurmeling, a booming, bright-eyed Berliner, is one of those well-meaning souls who feel compelled to share their righteousness with less fortunate neighbors. Herr Doktor Wurmeling is West Germany's first Minister for Family Affairs, the official champion of a higher birth rate, a lower divorce rate, more authority for the German husband. A zealous Roman Catholic husband and father (five children), he deplores short skirts, long embraces, plunging necklines. "My ministry," explains Wurmeling, "is the patron saint and guardian of the family."

Franz-Josef Wurmeling's ministry is exceedingly small (only 15 employees), but in the five months since Chancellor Konrad Adenauer created the job for him, the Minister for Family Affairs has made himself the most controversial man in the Cabinet. Since he has little, if any, authority to do things, Dr. Wurmeling has worked simply at saying things. Under fire from several segments of society—Socialists, feminists, moviemakers, Protestant and anticlerical wings of his own party, some of the judiciary—he stood before a crowd of admirers last week and promised: "I shall not close my mouth."

Errant Actors. A bluff six-footer who served in the World War I navy, studied law and economics, Wiirmeling, 53, began a career in the German civil service but was fired by the Nazis (1939) and turned to mining (basalt). After World War II he pitched into Christian Democratic politics, was soon on the party's three-man executive board, the recognized leader of its strong Catholic right wing, and one of Adenauer's busiest campaign speakers. (Wurmeling, his wife recalls, campaigned so hard that "he used to give speeches in his sleep.") After the last election. Adenauer repaid the debt by creating the Ministry for Family Affairs and commissioning Franz-Josef Wurmeling to try to promote for Germany's morals the kind of recovery the economists and politicians have achieved in material affairs.

Wurmeling turned first to divorce. "It just won't do," said he, "to allow someone who feels the urge to change wives one day to be able to do so the next." He cited the facts and figures of German divorce: "Between 1948-52 we had 480,000 divorces"—105 out of every 1,000 marriages.* Then, without any other evidence to back him up, Wurmeling suggested that much of the fault lay with too lenient non-Catholic judges, who "refuse to take a religious oath." That did it. Germans of many denominations joined in denouncing Wurmeling for interfering with civil liberties, attacking the integrity of the courts, and "turning everything upside down." To soothe the ruffled Bundestag, the Minister of the Interior had to take the floor and explain that the Family Minister was "not expressing the policy of the federal government."