After unification: Conversations with East Germans

Orbis

Volumn 49, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 491-502

  Pryor, Frederic ^a  

^a SWARTHMORE COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 19944367006     PISSN: 00304387     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.orbis.2005.04.004     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Some observers also argue that collegiality in the workplace has declined because the new bosses are West Germans who wish to encourage more formal interpersonal relations between workers, for instance, using the formal Sie rather than Du. I found no evidence of this.
2. Henk Flap and Beate Völker, "Communist Societies, the Velvet Revolution, and Weak Ties: The Case of East Germany", in Gabriel Badesen and Eric M. Uslaner, eds., Social Capital and the Transition to Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2003).
3. Some possibly contrary evidence is reported by Wolfgang Zapf, Roland Habich, Thomas Bulmahn and Jan Delhey ["The Case of Germany: Transformation through Unification", in Wadyslaw Adamski, Pavel Machonin, and Wolfgang Zapf, eds., Structural Change and Modernization in Post-Socialist Societies (Hamburg: Krämer Verlag, 2002), who report that roughly the same percentage of East and West Germans at that time reported "often feeling lonely". This may, however, reflect their family situation more than social isolation per se. The same source reports that in the late 1990s a much lower percentage of East Germans invited friends for dinner than West Germans, but we don't know if this percentage has declined since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
4. Andreas Glaeser, Divided in Unity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 82. In her ethnographic study of a small farming community in East Germany (Where the World Ended, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), Daphne Berdahl finds a similar phenomenon and attributes it to two factors: (1) the close personal connections needed to obtain scarce goods under communism, are no longer required; and (2) income differentials (and employment status) have increased, thus reducing the commonality in people's lives.
5. Eric M. Uslaner, "Trust and Civic Engagement in East and West", in Badesen and Uslaner, Social Capital. His data refer to the first part of the 1990s and come from the World Value Study.
6. Flap and Völker, "Communist Societies".
7. Statistisches Bundesamt, Datenreport 2004, at www.destatis.de, p. 173. Other indicators include participation in social activities.
8. Ibid., p. 643. They present a table listing four types of political and religious organizations, three types of social organizations, and six types of leisure group activities. In all thirteen types of organizations, the percentage of the East German population participating was lower than in the West Germany.
9. This lower social participation also extends to young adults from age 17 to 25: East German youth are less likely to participate in church activities, sports, and clubs and social work than those in West Germany (ibid., p. 560).
10. Using data from the World Value Study and also the Post-Communist Organizational Membership Study (PCOMS), Marc Morjé Howard documents the same phenomenon, in The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 73.
11. Stephen Padgett, Organizing Democracy in Eastern Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 88.
12. Paul Froese and Steven Pfaff, "Replete and Desolate Markets: Poland, East Germany, and the New Religious Paradigm", Social Forces, December 2001.
13. Padgett, Organizing Democracy, p. 104, presents additional survey evidence showing greater mistrust in military, judicial, police, civil service, and governmental services in the East than in the West.
14. Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society, pp. 102 ff.
15. Zapf, Habich, Bulmahn, and Delhey, "The Case of Germany", p. 252.
16. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (New York: ECCO, 2004).
17. Schwartz also wrote the question I posed to my respondents about the impact of the greater variety of consumer goods so that his theory would be adequately tested. The Datenreport 2004, (p. 459) also reports the peculiar result that a higher percentage of East Germans are dissatisfied with the supply of goods and services than West Germans. Schwartz speculated to me that these results were a reflection of the relative deprivation of consumer goods during the communist era and that the next generation would be different. The Datenreport question, however, was asked only of families with children under six, which suggests that they were relatively young and were relatively less influenced by their memories of the Communist era than older East Germans.
18. Datenreport 2004, p. 464.
19. Ibid., p. 624.
20. This can be seen in the analysis of the Datenreport 2004, esp. the table on p. 462.
21. Zapf, Habich, Bulmahn, and Delhey, "The Case of Germany", p. 252.
22. In this single instance my survey results seem to differ from those of public opinion studies. For instance, the Datenreport 2004 reports that a considerably higher percentage of East Germans with children under six were satisfied with the system of children's care than West Germans (p. 459). My respondents, however, seemed to be referring to the system of care for children of all ages, rather than just the youngest.
23. Data for this statement are drawn from Frederic L. Pryor, Public Expenditures in Communist and Capitalist Nations (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968), Appendices A-4, A-14, and E-9. Although these data refer to the late 1950s, it is highly likely that such differences persisted throughout the entire period.
24. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a number of East German dissidents urged the continuation of an East German state, but reformed and democratic. Shortly thereafter, on November 28, 1989, Helmut Kohl proposed a confederation of the two Germanys, in which they would meet as equals. Support for both proposals waned in the early months of 1990, and the East Germans abandoned the writing of a new East German constitution before the election on March 18. After the CDU won a plurality of seats in the new East German Volkskammer, political interest turned instead toward a new Kohl initiative, an economic and currency union of the two Germanys. After such a treaty was signed on May 18, the East German economy quickly collapsed, and on October 3, East Germany voluntarily allowed itself to be absorbed by West Germany.
25. A great number of such polls are summarized in Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann and Renate Koeher, eds., Allensbacher Jahrbuch der Demoskopie, Band 11, 1998-2002 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2002).
26. Datenreport 2004, p. 649. When the question was posed in a more general fashion without reference to Germany, the replies of East and West Germans were more similar to each other, which suggests considerable discontent about the actualities of German democracy, rather than democracy per se. The same source, p. 650, reports a time series on satisfaction with the functioning of democracy.
27. Zapf, Habich, Bulmahn, and Delhey, "The Case of Germany", pp. 258-60.
28. More ominous, in the conflict between poor and rich, the differences in perceptions between East and West Germany increased over the 1990s, as reported by Roland Habich, "Immer mehr fuer immer mehr. Anmerkungen zur Wohlfahrtsforschung in vergleichender Perspective", in Wolfgang Glatzer, Roland Habich, and Karl Ulrich Mayer, eds., Sozialer Wander und gesellschaftliche Dauerbeobachtung (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 2002), p. 212.
29. Laurence McFalls conducted several hundred interviews with East Germans and stressed these results in his Communism's Collapse, Democracy's Demise? (New York University Press, 1995)
30. "Germany and the Return of the Communists", in Michael Kraus and Ronald D. Liebowitz, eds., Russia and Eastern Europe after Communism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996).
31. Datenreport 2004, p. 651.
32. I analyze these results in "National Values and Economic Growth", American Journal of Economic and Sociology, forthcoming 2005.
33. Noelle-Neumann and Koeher, Allensbacher Jahrbuch.
34. Glaeser, Divided in Unity, p. 192-202.