Sunday, December 18, 2005
About 56 percent of German and 50 percent of U.S. marriages fail.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
BERLIN -- You're a divorced, middle-aged German guy thumbing through the new War of the Roses magazine when you discover on Page 8 how much the dating scene has changed since you and your disco threads were last on the prowl: The Billy Boy condom company wants to rent you a "flirt dog."
It's not a designer prophylactic. It's a real dog. German women love dogs, which, by extension, means they might consider going out with the guy on the other end of the leash. The dog is the "ultimate secret recipe for the successful flirt," states the magazine, which also has advice on how to cook salmon in the dishwasher.
War of the Roses, the only magazine of its kind in Germany, and possibly Europe, is written for the lost, hurt, mending, defiant, neurotic souls of the divorced. It is a mix of intriguing snippets and longer, probing stories on custody battles, psychological syndromes, divorce law, investment tips and the perils of Internet dating.
What's inside
"People are telling us, 'Why didn't this magazine exist when my divorce was going on?'" said Mike H. Neumann, who edits the magazine with colleague Marion von Gratkowski. War of the Roses debuted in October and was named after the 1989 Hollywood black comedy in which Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas played a couple in the midst of a brawling divorce.
"RosenKrieg," as it is known in German, prints 35,000 copies of each bimonthly edition, with a core readership of men and women between 25 and 50. Its design is a mix of muted glitz and matter-of-factness, like pasting a provocative cover on a mathematics quarterly. A muscular naked man enfolded in thought fronts the December issue.
The headlines and profiles elucidate the whimsical vagaries of love and the sting of solitary reality:
"No one and nothing will ever take my freedom again," states a dour-looking guy named Georg, pictured on page 36 wearing a leather jacket and leaning against a silver-studded Harley. Georg's "nightmare" marriage cost him 250,000 euros, or about $300,000, and three stays in a psychiatric hospital. He was saved, he explains, by a vision of himself riding through a summer field, smelling flowers and his own sweat and throttling toward the sunset.
Like an epidemic
"There are about 220,000 divorces in Germany a year, and that's up from about 150,000 from a decade ago," Neumann said. "It's a problem. Everything is more separated. People are more egoistic. They don't know what to do with their partners and their kids. And if you're the child of a divorce, you carry the 'divorce disease' with you."
The magazine mirrors a divorce rate that is among the highest in Europe. Like much of the continent, this nation of 82 million is increasingly secular and economically uncertain. The religious and social precepts that once held marriages together are loosening.