114 RALF AHRENS AND ANDRÉ STEINER
slower pace of welfare state expansion, and the partially deteriorating
international selling conditions for West German industries stemming in
part from competition coming from newly industrializing countries.^46
The increasingly saturated consumer goods markets, with their ever
more demanding consumers, also factored into this process during the
“Golden Age” in the West. But the 1970s were also an age of ambiva-
lence, in which the advent of mass consumption served as the counter-
point to economic crises accompanied by growing unemployment. Within
this mass consumption society, moreover, consumer demands became
more and more diff erentiated and refi ned from the 1970s onward. These
developments proved to be a problem for the SED leadership, too, be-
cause as televisions became more commonplace in households, GDR res-
idents learned more quickly about the newer and better quality products
available in the West. Consumer society in the West had moved beyond
the satisfaction of simple consumer demands as clothing labels and car
brands became status symbols. The younger generation in the GDR that
had not lived through the meager postwar and reconstruction years was
also more susceptible to consumerism, which meant that young people
came to expect that a similar array of goods would also become available
in East Germany. But the SED leaders could not cave into these consumer
cravings—nor did they want to—because their idea of consumption was
shaped by what they considered to be essential to meet the needs of a
working-class family during the Weimar Republic, which was the period
in which most of them were socialized. In the 1970s and 1980s, there-
fore, it was no longer even theoretically possible for the East to achieve
its alternative aspirations of generating its own pattern of consumption.^47
In terms of production, the Fordist model had reached the limits of its
expansion in the West. The growth stimuli that came through the third
industrial revolution, with its fl exibilization of technology and the emerg-
ing model of post-Fordist production that went along with it, were still
too weak to counteract this development. Similarly, the new jobs being
created in the service sector were not enough to off set the rapid increase
in unemployment that was taking place. Especially since it was primar-
ily the more capital-intensive areas of this sector that were expanding,
hardly any jobs were being generated for low-skilled workers or those
with training in specifi c industries. The statistics indicating a low level
of labor mobility between the primary sector and the secondary and ter-
tiary sectors refl ected this development, confi rming the segregation of
the corresponding job markets. On the whole, the core of the tertiariza-
tion process in the FRG was not a sectoral structural shift, but rather a
cross-sector transformation of production structures that was being pro-
pelled by fi ercer competition on the domestic and international markets.^48