Germany

After 1950 there were two states in the German territory, the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The conditions of family life could not have been more different than between these two states, although both were founded on a common cultural heritage and both shared the historical experience of the Nazi period with its particular ideal of the traditional family. Comparing East and West Germany enables one to study the effects of a socialist authoritarian political system with a planned economy and of a pluralist democratic system with a market economy on family life and family development.

Family development in East Germany was affected by three factors: the cultural heritage of the traditional model of the bourgeois family, the shortage of labor supply (a problem that began with the creation of the GDR), so that women were always needed in the labor force, and, in fact, the state was successful with strategies to exhaust this potential, so that lifelong full-time employment became obligatory for women. Finally, the egalitarian socialist ideology had an important effect on gender relations. Consequently, the pattern of family development and family life that emerged in the GDR during the four decades of its existence was marked by considerable modernity and gender equality. But never it did fulfil the promises of an egalitarian model (Trappe 1995). Although the status of working women in most parts of the Western world may be characterized as the double burden of paid work and housework, women in East Germany had to bear a triple burden of paid work, exclusive responsibility for their household and children, and additional stress imposed on them by an inefficient economy making the acquisition of the goods of daily life an effort (Wendt 1997).

Family formation in East Germany started early, the mean age at first marriage was twenty-one, and it was finished early in the life cycle, usually after the birth of the second child, frequently before age thirty. There were several incentives to start early. Young married couples got a loan from the state, which they did not have to pay back completely if they had children. In a planned non-market-economy with housing shortages married couples with children had special privileges to obtain a flat of their own. One did not take a big risk starting an early family career, even during vocational training or as a student. No one had to fear unemployment and severe economic problems. The earlier women completed the family formation, the longer was the phase of work experience without any further interruption because of childbirth. Comprehensive day care for children was available everywhere. Falling birth rates in the early 1970s forced the state to provide all-day public day care for children under ten and to introduce one year of parental leave with wage compensation (Huinink and Wagner 1995).

In the GDR incentives to marry and a repression of religious values and institutions in an atheist society resulted in a remarkable decay of the traditional meaning of marriage. The consequence was an increase of divorce rates during the 1980s. whether or not they had children, women were economically independent from their male partners. With an early marriage losing its advantages during the 1980s, an increasing proportion of births took place out of wedlock: by 1989 the figure was 34 percent. Also, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose. In 2002, 50 percent of all cohabiting couples in East Germany live with children; in West Germany this figure is only about 15 percent. However, the proportion of single living men or women in East Germany was considerably lower than in West Germany.

After the breakdown of the socialist regime in East Germany and the reunification of the two German states in the 1990, fertility and marriage rates dropped by more than 50 percent (Conrad, Lechner, and Werner 1996), and divorce rates decreased. Klaus Peter Strohmeier and Hans-Joachim Schulze (1995) interpret these shifts as signs of a biographic moratorium of the younger generation avoiding binding decisions in times of rapid change and uncertainty. People wanted to avoid risks, modified their aspirations, and postponed binding decisions. Postponement of family formation made the mean age of women's first birth rise from twenty-two to twenty-six. Family formation of the young women aged fifteen to twenty-four in East Germany approached the West German pattern. In the first years of the twenty-first century, marriage and birth rates in East Germany are far below the West German level, and more couples in East Germany than in West Germany avoid having a second child (Kreyenfeld 2002).

Does all this mean that East German family formation will assimilate to the West German pattern? The adaptation scenario is supported by the fact that the conditions of the transition to adulthood with its uncertainties and risks during early adulthood are now quite similar in East and West Germany—leaving aside the persistent problem of the economic transformation of the East. Demographic indicators, however, support the contradicting thesis of a persisting difference between East and West. Family formation in East Germany still starts earlier and will be completed earlier than in West Germany. Fewer women remain childless in East Germany and the proportion of one-child families in East Germany is higher than in West Germany. The proportion of illegitimate births in East Germany at the beginning of the twenty-first century is 50 percent, whereas in the West it is only 20 percent. This may prove that, indeed, marriage has lost its institutional relevance in East Germany even in the case of motherhood, whereas in West Germany a strong institutional linkage of motherhood and marriage persists. In East Germany we see indications of the establishment of a postmodern family without marriage, with only one child. However, maintaining the individual double income strategy under the new restrictive policy profile is difficult. There are severe compatibility problems, although female labor force participation in the East is still considerably higher than in the West.