Working people and consumption under really-existing socialism: Perspectives from the German democratic republic

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn , Issue 55, 1999, Pages 92-111

  Merkel, Ina ^a  

^a HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0033411429     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0147547999003208     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. Kurt Lungwitz, Über die Klassenstruktur in der DDR. Eine sozialökonomisch-statistische Untersuchung (Berlin, GDR, 1962).
2. Manfred Lötzsch and Joachim Freitag, "Sozialstruktur und soziale Mobilität," in Jahrbuch für Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Berlin 1981); and Artur Meier, "Abschied von der sozialistischen Ständegesellschaft," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 16-17 (1990):3-14.
3. Manfred Lötzsch and Joachim Freitag, "Sozialstruktur und soziale Mobilität," in Jahrbuch für Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Berlin 1981); and Artur Meier, "Abschied von der sozialistischen Ständegesellschaft," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 16-17 (1990):3-14.
4. Michael Vester, ed., Soziale Milieus in Ostdeutschland (Köln, 1995).
5. It may be noted in passing that the kitchen-cum-living room was heavily attacked in the 1950s as a remnant of capitalist housing, but also from an emancipatory viewpoint:Housework was to be transferred from the private into the social sphere. Foremost in these efforts was the implementation of common eating in work places and schools, which was to liberate working women from an important part of their housework.
6. Recent analysis seems to confirm these results: In 1991, sixty-one percent of East Germans saw themselves in the lower workforce, as compared to only twenty-five percent in the West. See Heinz-Herbert Noll and Friedrich Schuster, "Soziale Schichtung: Niedrigere Einstufung der Ostdeutschen. Wahrnehmung und Bewertung sozialer Ungleichheit im Ost-West-Vergleich," in Informationsdienste Soziale Indikatoren 7 (January 1992):2.
7. Lungwitz, Klassenstruktur.
8. In the 1950s and 1960s, members of the "old" intelligentsia received a special individual contract. It included the promise of special financial support, special material support in building a family house, permission for their children to study whatever they wished, etc.