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mostly of two generations – characters in their twenties with middle-aged
parents. Unlike Coronation Street, it is a common (but acceptable) scandal for older
men to have affairs with much younger women, often going on to marry them
(as in the case of Brinkman in Die Schwarzwaldklinik). During the episodes we
reviewed it was the 50-year-old Kurt Sperling who was having an affair with Iffi,
his son Momo’s girlfriend, while the two teenagers were bringing up their
(perhaps his) child. Other cases in the history of the soap include Hans Breimer,
who divorced his wife Helga because he was having an affair with the younger
Anna Ziegler, whom he then married, Andy Zenke (Iffi’s father, married to the
much younger Gabi), and the 55-year-old Dr Dressler, who had two children
from a former marriage and is married to the 30-year-old Tanja.
In Coronation Street, while characters break up, have affairs and remarry,
romance and marriage usually stays within the same generation. Moreover,
there are a number of older single women who are active and independent and
take part in the story. In Lindenstrasse most women are young; the few older ones,
such as Else King, who, with Onkel Franz, provides the moments of comic relief,
and Helga Beimer (‘fat, not nice or attractive’, according to our informant, ‘was
the boss in the house when she and Hans were married’) are ridiculed, even
hated. The one exception is Amelie Von Der Marwitz, sixty-ish, aristocratic and
the ‘fairy godmother’ of Lisa, who has no real mother. Our informant adds that
her money comes ‘from having had relations with wealthy men’, and she is now
single. Interestingly, though Lindenstrasse provides a middle-class environment,
Eva Sperling (Kurt Sperling’s wife) is the only woman who has a profession
but (as in the American daytime soaps) she is not shown in her professional
surroundings and the story-line presents her as weaker than her unemployed
husband. Gender patterns seem to indicate a segregation between networks of
buddies, and (to a lesser extent) of women friends, who feel much better with
same-sex than with opposite-sex contacts.

The dyadic model

Interchanging couples constitutes a type of soap which is destabilized in three
ways. First, it operates by characters constantly exchanging places within the
framework of intragenerational and intergenerational relations, with characters
perpetually experimenting with new intimate partners. Second, the structure of
those relationships is changed as characters experiment with new forms of part-
nership (from heterosexual to homosexual, from a dyad to a triad). Third, the
biological structure itself is constantly reinvented as characters keep trying to
resurrect a ‘real’ (and maybe stable) lost family, and relationships have to be
redefined as familiar characters emerge as biological blood relations. This type
of soap both redefines family and community, and brings about the destruction
of each as a stable environment and framework for the story.
This pattern is represented in our sample by the German Gute Zeiten, Schlechte
11
Zeiten and the Dutch Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden and Onderweg Naar Morgen.
While this subgenre draws heavily on melodrama – no social realism here – it