By KATRIN BENNHOLD

NEUOTTING, Germany - Manuela Maier was branded a bad mother. A Rabenmutter, or raven mother, after the bird that pushes chicks out of the nest. She was ostracized by other mothers, berated by neighbors and family and screamed at in a local store.

Her crime? Signing up her 9-yearold son Florian when the primary school first offered lunch and afternoon classes last autumn - and returning to work.

“I was told: ‘Why do you have children if you can’t take care of them?’ ” Ms. Maier, 47, recalled. By comparison, she said, having a first son out of wedlock 21 years ago raised few eyebrows in this traditional town in Bavaria, Germany’s highly Catholic and conservative southern state, she said.

Ten years into the 21st century, most primary and secondary schools in Europe’s biggest economy still end before lunch, typically around 1 p.m., a tradition that dates back nearly 250 years. It has powerfully sustained the homemaker- mother image of German lore and was long credited with producing well-bred, well-read burghers.

Modern Germany may be run by a woman - Chancellor Angela Merkel, routinely called the world’s most powerful woman in politics - but it seems no coincidence that she is childless. The half-day school system survived feudalism, the rise and demise of Hitler’s mother cult, the women’s movement of the 1970s and reunification with East Germany.

Now, in the face of economic necessity, it is crumbling: one of the lowest birthrates in the world, the specter of labor shortages and slipping educational standards have prompted a reconsideration. Since 2003, nearly a fifth of Germany’s 40,000 schools have phased in afternoon programs, and more plan to follow suit.

“This is a taboo we just can’t afford anymore,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the German labor minister. “The country needs women to be able to both work and have children.” A mother of seven and a doctor-turned-politician, Ms. von der Leyen baffles homemakers and childless career women alike, not to mention many men in her Christian Democrat Party.

For her, the spread of all-day schooling in Germany is “irreversible,” as women flock into the work force . In Germany, one-fifth of households de-pend on the income of women.

This trend makes child care a question of competitiveness, notes Karen Hagemann, a professor of European and gender history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “High birthrates and female employment rates tend to move together,” said Ms. Hagemann, an expert on Germany’s system. “Child care and a school system that covers the working day is key.”

In 1763, Prussia was the first country to make education compulsory for the lower classes. The half-day system evolved in an era that depended on child labor. By the time France and Britain set up all-day systems a century later, the German way had grown deep roots.

Germany’s middle classes long believed that they, not the state, should round out children’s general culture. No school, the thinking went, could improve on a mother.

Edith Brunner, 41, is that increasingly rare German model mother. A qualified tax adviser and mother of four, she went to part-time work after her first child and then gave up her job altogether. She spends afternoons checking homework and shuttling from flute and piano lessons to soccer training and gymnastics. Her husband is a well-paid physicist.

But the system discouraged more highly educated women from having children; by their mid-40s, one in three German women lives in a childless household, which gives Germany, along with Austria, the highest proportion of such households in Europe.

The old ways also were ill adapted to a Germany in which rising numbers of students were immigrants, many of whom needed more help in basic skills. In 2001, a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of the world’s most developed democracies with marketbased economies, of the literacy skills of 15-year-olds stunned Germany by ranking it 21st out of 27, and near the bottom in terms of social mobility. Two years later, the government made $5.7 billion available to introduce all-day programs at 10,000 of the country’s 40,000 schools by 2009; 7,200 schools took part.

Mothers have responded strongly. Wolfgang Gruber of the Bavarian education authority uses words like “flood” and “avalanche” to describe demand for afternoon schooling. Between 2006 and 2009, only 40 primary schools in Bavaria converted. This school year, the number of all-day programs rose to 150.

“Many obstacles remain, and a backlash is always possible,” said Ms. Hagemann, the history professor. But, in Germany and elsewhere, once unthinkable notions are now being entertained. “All change,” she said, “starts with a change in the head.”


Manuela Maier felt ostracized after she enrolled her 9-year-old son in afternoon classes and returned to work. / GORDON WELTERS FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE