scholarly journals Comparing the Post-War Germanies: Breadwinner Ideology and Women's Employment in the Divided Nation, 1948–1970

1997 ◽  
Vol 42 (S5) ◽  
pp. 175-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine von Oertzen ◽  
Almut Rietzschel
Keyword(s):  
West Germany ◽  
Female Employment ◽  
Striking Difference ◽  
Women's Employment ◽  
Women’S Employment ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East German ◽  
East And West ◽  
Post War

In 1989, when Germany became reunified after forty years of separation, no one could overlook the fact that East and West Germany differed greatly with regard to the position of women. The most striking difference of all seemed to lie in the rates of female employment: 91 per cent of all East German women under the age of 60 were counted as being employed, compared to only 55 per cent in West Germany.

scholarly journals Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall - Do East and West Germans still differ in their attitudes towards women’s employment and the division of housework?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gundula Zoch
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Maternal Employment ◽  
Well Being ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Female Employment ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
East West

Previous cross-sectional studies show less traditional gender ideologies among East Germans after German reunification and even suggest slightly increasing East-West disparities. These findings challenge the assumptions of stable ideologies over the life-course as well as cohort replacement-based convergence over time. This study expands on previous research by analysing differences and trends in gender ideologies in the context of East and West Germany using data from the German Family Panel pairfam (2008-2018). It distinguishes between three cohorts born in the early 1970s, 1980s and 1990s who have different socialisation experiences before and after reunification. The results show smaller East-West differences in gender ideologies for the youngest cohort compared with larger gaps for the two older cohorts born before reunification. Convergence of ideologies is partly due to modernisation trends in West Germany and re-traditionalisation effects in East Germany across cohorts, but also due to attitudinal changes with age. Attitudes towards housework and female employment have particularly converged, while views on maternal employment and the consequences for children’s well-being continue to differ between East and West Germany. The findings underline the importance of persistent, long-lasting ideology differences due to the regime‐specific socialisation and composition resulting from the division of Germany, but also emphasizes the role of ideology change across cohorts and over the life-course for the overall converging trends in gender ideologies.

Post-unification (East) German Documentary and the Contradictions of Identity

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barton Byg
Keyword(s):  
West Germany ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East German ◽  
Innovative Enterprise ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Individual

This chapter focuses on the three major themes that have helped make the integration between East and West German documentary filmmakers successful and have contributed new strengths to German independent documentary as a productive and innovative enterprise. It first illustrates the phenomenon of collaboration between filmmakers from both East and West Germany, which preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall and provides the basis for unique accomplishments in documentary. Then, partly based on these East–West collaborations, it discuss examples of German documentary's frequent explorations of non-European topics, which challenge the clear separation of European and non-European in both politics and film art. Here, the film collaborations between Helga Reidemeister and Lars Barthel will serve as a case study. Finally, also as a result of decades of experimentation with the nature of the film medium's presentation of ‘reality’, ‘history’, and the individual human subject, Thomas Heise's German ‘portrait film’ Barluschke (1997) is explored as an example of this defining quality of independent German documentary filmmaking in the context of the post-Cold War.

After the Wall: Parental attitudes to child rearing in East and West Germany

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Uhlendorff
Keyword(s):  
Parental Attitudes ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
Path Analyses ◽  
The Social ◽  
Family Orientation ◽  
Kinship Relations ◽  
East German ◽  
East And West

In the years following German reunification, East and West German parents (282 mothers and 207 fathers) were interviewed about attitudes to the rearing of their 7- to 13-year-old children and about their social networks. Path analyses show that East German parents engage in more protective and less permissive parenting, and that East German fathers raise their children in a more traditional and authoritarian manner than their West German counterparts. In part, these differences can be attributed to the strong family orientation of East German parents (many and intensive kinship relations, few friends). Further analyses show that corollaries of the social upheavals in East Germany, namely closer cohesion of the immediate family and a decrease in the social support provided by the extrafamilial environment, are associated with protective attitudes to parenting and hence with the tendency to limit children’s freedom of decision-making.

Catching-up of East German Labour Productivity in the 1990s

2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ray Barrell ◽  
Dirk Willem te Velde
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
Labour Productivity ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Foreign Firms ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
East German ◽  
East And West ◽  
Organization Of Production

Abstract We provide empirical evidence for exogenous and endogenous catching-up of East German labour productivity to West German levels. We argue that labour productivity in East Germany has caught up faster than has happened elsewhere. The sudden formation of the German Monetary Union was followed by large transfers to East Germany, migration of workers to West Germany, reorganization and privatization of East German firms. This has quickly led to a partial closing of the organizational, idea and object gaps that existed between East and West Germany. This paper analyses labour productivity in East and West Germany using both aggregate German data and unbalanced panel analysis of developments in East and West Germany. Factors affecting the organization of production, and especially privatization and `foreign' firms, are found to be particularly important in this context.

Red Power: Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and Indian Activist Networks in East and West Germany

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Glenn Penny
Keyword(s):  
American Indian ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Red Power ◽  
American Indian Movement ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
East German ◽  
German Newspaper ◽  
Post War

A curious photograph appeared in 1976 in the East-German newspaper Junge Welt (Fig. 1). Two well-known members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Dennis Banks and Vernon Bellecourt, were shown together with an elderly German woman, Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, at her home in East Berlin. This photo, like so many of the photos of Indians in unexpected places, always seems to amuse people, leading them to ask with a snigger why the Indians were there. The Indians' presence in such places, however, is seldom a laughing matter, and in this case, scholars of the post-war era might find the answer to the simple question of the Indians' presence somewhat disconcerting.

scholarly journals Communicating and Visualising Urban Planning in Cold War Berlin

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Bernhardt ◽  
Kathrin Meissner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Media Campaigns ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
New Strategy ◽  
East And West ◽  
Post War

This article analyses the dynamics of communication, specifically with regard to the significance of visualisations in urban planning between the two competing political regimes of East and West Germany in divided Berlin (1945–1989). The article will demonstrate the ways in which planners on either side of the Iron Curtain were confronted with matters unique to their own political contexts and conditions for public communication, as well as how they faced similar challenges in fields of urban renewal and negotiating public participation. The post-war decades in Berlin were marked by strong planning dynamics: large-scale reconstruction after WWII and the ‘showcase character’ of political confrontation and competition. In this context, new strategies of communicating urban planning to the public were developed, such as large-scale development plans, public exhibitions and cross-border media campaigns. Paradigmatic shifts during the mid-1970s generated new discourses about urban renewal and historic preservation. The new focus on small-scale planning in vivid and inhabited inner-city neighbourhoods made new forms of communication and public depiction necessary. In the context of social and political change as well as growing mediatisation, planning authorities utilised aspects of urban identity and civic participation to legitimise planning activities. The article traces two small-scale planning projects for neighbourhoods in East and West Berlin and investigates the interrelation of visual communication instruments in public discourses and planning procedures during the 1980s, a period that prominently featured the new strategy of comprehensive planning. Furthermore, the article highlights the key role of micro-scale changes in the management of urban renewal along both sides of the wall and the emergence of neighbourhood civil engagement and participation.

How Robust is the IAT? Measuring and Manipulating Implicit Attitudes of East-and West-Germans

2001 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrich Kühnen ◽  
Michael Schießl ◽  
Nadine Bauer ◽  
Natalie Paulig ◽  
Claudia Pöhlmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Implicit Attitudes ◽  
West Germany ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East German ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Dimension 2 ◽  
East And West ◽  
Underlying Processes ◽  
East West ◽  
Representative Samples

Abstract. We investigated consequences of priming East-West-German related self-knowledge for the strength of implicit, ingroup-directed positive evaluations among East- and West-Germans. Based on previous studies we predicted opposite effects of self-knowledge priming for East- and West-Germans. Since in general the East-German stereotype is regarded as more negative than the West-German one, bringing to mind East-West-related self-knowledge (relative to neutral priming) was expected to attenuate ingroup favoritism for East-Germans, but to increase it for West-Germans. After having fulfilled the priming tasks, participants worked on an IAT-version in which the to be classified stimuli were East- or West-German city names (dimension 1) and positive or negative adjectives (dimension 2). Results of Experiment 1 showed (a) that East- and West-German students implicitly evaluated their ingroups as more positive than the outgroups and (b) confirmedthe predictions of the priming influence. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with more representative samples from East- and West-Germany. The results are discussed with regard to underlying processes of implicit attitudes in intergroup contexts.

Rejecting Radbruch: The European Court of Human Rights and the Crimes of the East German Leadership

2001 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 653-663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Miller
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Central Line ◽  
West Germany ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
European Court ◽  
East German ◽  
East And West

The European Court of Human Rights found no violation of the Convention in its judgement in the complaints of the former East German political and military leaders Streletz, Kessler, and Krenz. All three were convicted and sentenced to terms in prison by German courts in relation to the deaths of East Germans who were killed in attempts at fleeing across the fortified border between East and West Germany. Nonetheless, the Court's decision constitutes a clear rejection of the Radbruch Formula, which served as a central line of reasoning in the decisions of the German courts in the cases. The author addresses the Court's rejection of the Radbruch Formula, focusing especially on the distinct historical and political circumstances that existed after World War II and in 1989.

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