A History of Germany 1918-2008 by Mary Fulbrook

Author:Mary Fulbrook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

9

Diverging Societies

As the streams of Trabant and Wartburg cars bumped across the newly opened borders from East to West Germany in the winter of 1989–90, it was quite clear that there was a considerable disparity between the quality of life of Germans in the two states. East Germans stared amazed at the wealth of consumer goods available in West German shops, and rapidly stocked up on bananas, oranges and other delights which had been rarities for so long. Conversely, visitors from West to East experienced with less pleasure the bumpy, pot-holed roads, often still cobbled, the crumbling plaster on the unpainted houses, the pall of pollution, belching yellow-grey factory fumes hanging over the sky, and the ubiquitous, dusty smell of brown coal. It was clear that East Germany had suffered from numerous disadvantages in terms of economic development, and that her modest successes in comparison with other East European economies in themselves constituted something of an economic miracle, though never on the same scale of that of West Germany. But to what extent had the two Germanies developed into different societies in the period before 1989?

Let us start with an attempt to compare the two Germanies in a number of different empirical respects. There was an obvious difference in the question of ownership of the means of production: in West Germany, capital remained predominantly in private ownership, while in East Germany between 1945 and 1989 private ownership of the means of production was to a major extent abolished. According to the GDR’s official statistics, in 1983 out of 8,445,300 economically active persons, only 397,100 were engaged in privately owned concerns.1 This effect was achieved in stages over the years; while, as we have seen, there were radical changes in socioeconomic structure in the occupation period, in 1952 over 45 per cent of the economy was still in private hands.2 In this fundamental respect, then, capitalist West and communist East were – by definition – quite different. In other respects, however, the similarities and differences were more muted. Both Germanies participated, to varying degrees, in the general shift of industrial societies away from manual towards white-collar occupations, giving rise to similar proportions of blue- to white-collar workers.3 The developments in the West were, however, more ‘advanced’ (in terms of theories of development of industrial societies) than in the East. According to the 1983 West German publication, Zahlenspiegel, while in the FRG only 5.9 per cent were employed in agriculture and forestry, the GDR still had nearly twice as many in this sector. (Zahlenspiegel gives a figure of 10.1 per cent; the official East German statistical yearbook gives 10.7 per cent, as compared with 27.9 per cent in 1950). More were employed in trade in the West (12.6 per cent) than in the East (9.6 per cent); and significantly more were employed in the service sector in the West (16.4 per cent) than in the East (6.9 per cent). There were other interesting differences too: 17.6 per cent of the East German

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