IB History Social Changes Notes

Germany After Reunification: Social Division and New Identity

Reunification as social shock

1. A rapid merger: German reunification on 3 October 1990 joined two societies that had developed under different political, economic, and social systems for more than 40 years.
   • West Germany brought parliamentary democracy, a social market economy, consumer abundance, and NATO membership. Eastern Germans came from a one-party state with full employment and heavy surveillance.
   • The legal process absorbed the East into the Federal Republic rather than creating a new state from two equal halves. Asymmetry shaped later resentment.
2. Currency union: the conversion of East German wages and savings into Deutsche Marks in 1990 gave people spending power but exposed firms to West German competition overnight.
   • East German goods became too expensive for their quality, and many factories lost markets in both East and West. Industrial collapse became a social crisis.
   • Unemployment rose sharply in the East, especially among older workers, industrial workers, and women. Job loss damaged identity as well as income.

East-West social division

1. The Treuhand experience: the Treuhandanstalt privatised or closed thousands of East German enterprises after reunification.
   • Supporters argued this was necessary because many firms were uncompetitive and heavily polluted. Market transition required painful restructuring.
   • Critics argued that the process devalued East German work, sold assets too cheaply, and placed decisions in West German hands. Loss of dignity became a recurring memory.
2. Mauer im Kopf: many Germans described a wall in the head, meaning a psychological divide that survived the physical Berlin Wall.

• Easterners often felt judged as backward, dependent, or politically immature, while Westerners sometimes saw the East mainly as a financial burden. Mutual stereotypes slowed social unity.
• Surveys decades later still showed lower trust, different voting patterns, and stronger feelings of second-class status in parts of the East. Memory shaped politics.

1. Ostalgie: nostalgia for aspects of East German life grew as some people remembered community, childcare, job security, and social equality more warmly than the dictatorship itself.
   • Ostalgie did not usually mean support for the Stasi or one-party rule. It often expressed grief over lost status and dismissed biographies.
   • This distinction matters because students should not treat all East German resentment as authoritarian nostalgia. Social interpretation needs care.

Demographic change

1. East to West migration: roughly 1.5 million people left eastern Germany between 1991 and 2000, many of them young, skilled, and female.
   • This weakened local economies because towns lost workers, students, parents, and future taxpayers. Demographic drain reinforced economic decline.
   • Some eastern towns experienced school closures, empty housing, and ageing populations. Shrinking communities became visible evidence of reunification’s cost.
2. Gender effects: East German women had often worked full-time under the GDR, but reunification pushed many out of employment as childcare and workplace structures changed.
   • The West German family model assumed more part-time female work and more private care within the household. Social norms moved westward with institutions.
   • Women’s migration westward also left some eastern areas with gender imbalances that affected family formation and local society. Demography became political.

Migration and citizenship

1. Germany as an immigration society: West Germany had recruited Gastarbeiter from Turkey, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, and elsewhere during the post-war boom.
   • By 1990, the Turkish-German community numbered around 1.5 million, but many still lacked automatic citizenship.
   • This exposed a contradiction because Germany depended on migrant labour but long denied that it was a country of immigration. Citizenship lagged behind social reality.
2. Citizenship reform in 2000: Germany introduced stronger ius soli elements, allowing many children born in Germany to resident foreign parents to acquire citizenship.
   • The reform moved Germany away from citizenship based mainly on descent, known as ius sanguinis.
   • It did not remove all debates over integration, language, dual citizenship, religion, and national identity. Legal inclusion did not settle cultural conflict.
   • Debate over integration resurfaced sharply in 2010, when Thilo Sarrazin's book intensified public argument over Muslim immigration and German identity.
3. Racism and violence: the early 1990s saw attacks on asylum seekers and migrants in places including Hoyerswerda, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Molln, and Solingen.
   • These attacks showed that reunification and immigration debates could combine with economic insecurity and nationalist anger. Xenophobia became a national issue.
   • The violence forced Germany to confront whether its post-war democratic identity could protect minorities in a changing society. Memory of Nazism shaped the response.

The refugee crisis and political backlash

1. Merkel’s 2015 decision: Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed large numbers of refugees stranded in Hungary to enter Germany during the 2015 refugee crisis.
   • Her phrase Wir schaffen das presented refugee reception as a test Germany could manage.
   • Germany received about 890,000 asylum seekers in 2015, the largest intake of any EU state.
2. Integration pressure: refugee arrival created urgent demands for housing, language teaching, schooling, job access, and local administration.
   • Many volunteers supported arrivals, while local authorities warned about capacity and long-term costs. Civil society and state capacity both mattered.
   • The debate revealed competing images of Germany: humanitarian democracy, overburdened welfare state, and anxious national community. Identity was at stake.
3. Rise of the AfD: the Alternative for Germany shifted from Eurozone criticism toward anti-immigration politics after 2015.
   • The AfD entered the Bundestag in 2017 with 12.6 percent of the vote and became especially strong in eastern Germany.
   • Its support linked migration politics to older eastern grievances about representation, dignity, and distance from Berlin. Post-reunification discontent gained a new form.

Memory, education, and representation

1. Remembering the GDR: unified Germany had to decide how to teach and memorialise the GDR as both a dictatorship and a society in which millions had lived ordinary lives.
   • Stasi files, museums, memorials, and school curricula exposed repression, surveillance, and border violence. Public memory focused strongly on dictatorship.
   • Some eastern Germans felt this reduced their lives to victimhood or complicity, ignoring work, family, education, and community. Biographical dignity became part of the memory debate.
2. Elite under-representation: eastern Germans remained under-represented in senior business, legal, academic, military, media, and political positions decades after reunification.
   • This mattered because formal equality did not automatically produce equal access to networks, credentials, and leadership roles. Institutional power remained western-heavy.
   • Under-representation helped sustain the feeling that reunification had been done to eastern Germans rather than with them. Voice became a social issue.
3. Generational change: younger Germans who did not live through division often experience East-West difference through family stories, place, schooling, and political culture.
   • This means the social effects of reunification did not disappear with the generation that remembered the GDR directly. Inherited memory shaped later identity.
   • A long-term view should therefore treat reunification as a continuing social process, not a single event completed in 1990.

Judging social change

1. Social integration succeeded partly: living standards in the East rose, infrastructure improved, democratic rights expanded, and citizens gained access to wider European mobility.
   • Reunification gave eastern Germans freedoms that the GDR had denied: travel, speech, elections, consumer choice, and legal protection. Political rights were a major social change.
   • A complete judgement must include these gains because social dislocation does not erase the end of dictatorship. Balance matters.
2. Social integration remained incomplete: employment loss, migration, lower eastern wealth, fewer eastern elites, and different political cultures kept division alive.
   • The strongest evidence is the persistence of eastern under-representation in senior positions and stronger support for anti-establishment parties. Power did not move east equally.
   • A strong Paper 3 answer should therefore argue that Germany unified legally in 1990, but socially over a much longer and uneven period.

1. Legal unification was fast, but social unification was not: eastern and western Germans kept measurably different lives, votes, and memories three decades after 1990.