"One should have just asked a Swabian housewife," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel when asked about the Lehman Brothers' collapse in 2008. In Germany, the traditional image of a housewife in the southwestern region of Swabia has typically been a positive one: a woman who is wise with her family's money.
Advertisement
Yet is there anything behind that stereotype? Does the frugal Swabian housewife actually exist? Reporter Joachim Eggers takes that question to Gerlingen, a small city near Stuttgart that prides itself on Swabian values.