Divorce After Separation: The German Experience

Extract

The fact that a Bill proposing divorce after seven years’ separation has passed its second reading in the House of A Commons, and that a Royal Commission is to investigate Divorce Law in general, makes relevant some consideration of the existing German law which provides for divorce after a separation of only three years. As was said during the House of Commons debate, once granted the principle of separation as grounds for divorce, even a shorter time limit might be adopted; and, since the German law provides the evidence of the working of such a law over a period of some thirteen years, it should be possible, from German experience, to consider the similar British proposals and their likely effects.

It is significant that the German law which permitted divorce by the objective fact of separation, in addition to divorce on the grounds of adultery or misconduct, came into force when Hitler had reached the climax of his career in 1938. The Hitler law had for its background theories of race and population: the man who was physically able to produce nordic children must not be hindered by the matrimonial vows which he once gave to a now ageing woman no longer capable of bearing children. One needs just to mention this primitive idea of the sense of matrimony to understand its full bearing. It was very characteristic that the upstarts of the Nazi party—the Kreisleiters and Gauleiters—were the first to make use of this law; their womenfolk who had carried the burden of the past were no longer young and sophisticated enough to fit in with the ‘glory’ of the new class: